Audacity has ben sold! It will have spyware in 3.0.3

[musikbear]

Sadly Audacity has been aquired by russia based 'Muse-group'.
The effect is that as of 3.0.3, Audacity will collect personal information, and you have to allow the new owner to sell your data for Advertising.
That is the nature of spyware!
LMMS' have previously recommended Audacity with no hesitations what so ever. It has been a fantastic and very useful supplement for LMMS.
After these sad news, at least i wont recommend Audacity any more.
Using += 3.0.3 would lead to spam in your mailbox, and having personal date collected from your pc, in the hands of anyone that are willing to pay russia based 'Muse-group', the money the demand.
It is sad to see celebrated free software being abused like this!
Get current Spyware free audacity NOW, and use that hereafter!

[Monospace]

https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desk ... ort%20data.
musikbear, the privacy policy states that Audacity does not collect personal information. It doesn't seem like you "have" to allow the new owner to "sell" your data. I've heard about Muse group who has acquired Audacity. From the looks of it, this turnaround will really improve the UI/UX of Audacity. Muse group has also acquired MuseScore, and their data should be relatively safe.
Unless, of course, I am reading the wrong privacy policy... I request the source of your information?
Well, then again, there's the fact that they seem to have changed it to reduce ambiguity of the policy and collected data...
Note: also, there is no way Audacity can actually get your email.

[Mastartiq]

I use Dark Audacity instead, it does the job for what I need, even is not updated in years. It is sad what happened to the Audacity and they will loose some of their users, but I guess it would not make too much difference anyway for an audio editor used by millions of people. It goes against the open source community, who is appreciating and respecting freedom more than anything.

Cheers!

[Gps]

From what I understand its something that can be turned off or on during compiling. (Audacity)

This might mean windows users cant just simply download the .exe file.

https://colindorman.com/horn/is-audacit ... s-it-safe/

A few days after the initial policy update, Audacity responded and clarified that telemetry tracking would be off by default. This means that the user would have to intentionally enable telemetry logging, and so casual users (who don’t dive into settings) or privacy-conscious users would see no real change from previous versions of Audacity. (Another note: Firefox enables their telemetry by default – users have to actively turn it off if they don’t want it phoning home.)

The community still had questions (primarily about 3rd party analytics companies), so Audacity cancelled their planned privacy policy updates. They also issued this update about how/why they will gather usage telemetry.

[Monospace]

Gps, it can be turned off in settings. Also, there doesn't seem to be telemetry.

[Gps]

I know from a Linux site (phoronix), there was quite an uproar, and as usual talk about a fork.

Its not really spyware but some use data can be send to audacity.

This is a clear example of the advantage of opensource software. They are not able to do this without anybody noticing.

The Fork: https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity

https://fosspost.org/audacity-developer ... cy-policy/

In addition, the developers clarified that Audacity 3.0.2 and earlier versions do not have any network capabilities (Not even checking for updates). However, Audacity 3.0.3 will by default send your IP address, operating system name and Audacity version to the company’s servers so that they can determine how many users they have in each country and on each platform (Which is, they say, very helpful for development efforts). Your IP address is never stored in a complete form on their servers – they say – and will be instantly anonymized so that no one can identify you.

[Monospace]

Not use data. Only demographic data. The privacy policy itself says that no personal data is stored, sold, or shared. The only data going to audacity will be crash reports, and the other "networking capability" is an update checker.

[brandystarbrite]

Yeah, I heard about audacity being sold, sometime last month. And I will admit, that bit of news sucks.

I was actually planning on making a topic on it too.

Some people are even worried, that Blender and others, might unfortunately go that route too, since if anyone else is aware, alot of big name game companies, are donating alot of money to the blender foundation, and a few other open source projects as well.

But as a few people and game designer/musicians on youtube said, to be safe, just use older versions of Audacity, that were created, before Audacity was acquired.

[Monospace]

Brandy, what's wrong with Audacity being sold? I understand people are worried, but MuseGroup collects only country (does that clarify as personal data?), and ever since MuseGroup redesigned Blender's interface its popularity has spiked. The primary reason big name game companies are investing in Blender is not so that they can collect data, but so that Blender becomes a viable software to develop with. It's a good thing. MuseGroup's servers are based in the EU, and they also own MuseScore.
Audacity is badly in need of a UI redesign, whether people realise it or not: I had a tech-savvy friend try to record something at it the other day, and he couldn't understand how to find most of the stuff he needed, despite it being logical: Logical != intuitive.
Plus, if you ignore the news and verify the privacy policy yourself, you'll realise it's actually pretty sensible. No personal data is collected, and your country is kept only for a day. The networking features have been introduced for auto-update checking and automated crash reporting, both of which are disable-able.

[Mastartiq]

Brandy, what's wrong with Audacity being sold? I understand people are worried, but MuseGroup collects only country (does that clarify as personal data?), and ever since MuseGroup redesigned Blender's interface its popularity has spiked. The primary reason big name game companies are investing in Blender is not so that they can collect data, but so that Blender becomes a viable software to develop with. It's a good thing. MuseGroup's servers are based in the EU, and they also own MuseScore.
Audacity is badly in need of a UI redesign, whether people realise it or not: I had a tech-savvy friend try to record something at it the other day, and he couldn't understand how to find most of the stuff he needed, despite it being logical: Logical != intuitive.
Plus, if you ignore the news and verify the privacy policy yourself, you'll realise it's actually pretty sensible. No personal data is collected, and your country is kept only for a day. The networking features have been introduced for auto-update checking and automated crash reporting, both of which are disable-able.

What is wrong about Audacity being bought by a company is against the open-source freedom. Once is released as an open-source software with an open-source license, you can only take the source code, change the product into something of your own, as much as possible and then sell it like a commercial product, like Mixxbus being based on Ardour. With audacity did not happened like that, it was sold as it is and yes it remained open-source, but it should not have been sold but given free. That`s why people are in fear for the other open-source software being bought too, some of us we just go pro and we encourage as much freedom as it can be, especially me, not necessarily open-source exclusive, but as free as possible. Data being collected is not a bad thing, unless is someone we don`t trust, yes you know what I mean, and also is against open-source community, who care about this and they did cared before too, is not something new, that`s why audacity was forked.

Have a nice day! Cheers!