as an additional explanation to the potential vast majority of our readers out there - Hello world !!! - (who may not have an account on forums/Purism) what this means is that if they (the Audacity devs/contributors) DECIDE to add such ‘features’ to the code-base then free-software - on the virtue of being LIBRE (free as in liberty but not necessarily ‘free’ of resources that need to be put into developing and maintaining and advancing the code base with quality code) - means that each person from the PUBLIC CAN READ AND MODIFY the source-code (written and distributed by devs/contributors through the internet) that concerns this particular issue - ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS or a community fork - (maybe people that WANT to send ‘telemetry’ back to the ‘company’ can see it and NOT touch the offending code in any way or even ENABLE the telemetry-code themselves)
there is ofc a discussion to be had still on the merits of being FOR (Aye) this issue but largely i believe there is enough literature out there for anybody interested in following Alice down the Rabbit hole …
so how do you recognize such ‘offending-code’ IF it gets added (by mistake or intentionally) in the source-code that accompanies free-software (usually by virtue of the GPL license as released by the GNU/FSF) ?
i would ask if there are any developers / contributors out there that would like / KNOW how to answer this question in an easy to understand manner for the masses …
just try your best to reveal to the GENERAL audience WHAT would they look FOR once they have the source-code open inside a text-editor ( could be Nano, Gedit, Vi/Vim, Emacs, etc. there are so many out there …) and how would they search for the ‘offending-code’ …