New Post: Audacity Telemetry and Why Free Software Means Better Privacy

[FranklyFlawless]

Well, I have an alternative citation from the Wikipedia article, which more or less rephrases the two of the three points mentioned, but notably omits the Contributor’s License Agreement:

In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group,[53] there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. Some users responded negatively, with accusations of turning Audacity into spyware.[54] The company reversed course, falling back to error/crash reporting and optional update checking instead. [55] Another controversy in July 2021[56] resulted from a change to the privacy policy which said that although personal data was stored on servers in the European Economic Area, the program would “occasionally [be] required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA”.[57] That July, the Audacity team apologized for the changes to the privacy policy and removed mention of the data storage provision which was added “out of an abundance of caution.”[56]

It was exactly after this article from @Kyle_Rankin that I stopped using Audacity, so since then I have transferred to other music production software or hardware. I did use Tenacity briefly, which is why I mentioned it earlier.