Audacity's new privacy policy
2021-07-06 19:23:42.356177+02 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
I've been using MacOS since joining my current employer, so much so that we even bought a MacBook Air for Charlene and have been migrating a lot of our computing that direction. I have a lot of complaints about the Apple environment, including the fact that so much stuff seems to be just an attempt to upsell to subscription services, and finding alternatives to Adware like "Music" (formerly iTunes) involves installing large portions of the open source ecosystem.
It was kinda like Open Source was the only place where the business model was coupled to the user model enough that you could get software which wasn't just trying to passive-aggressively fleece you out of spending more money on confusing data models.
But, of course, Open Source doesn't have a business model, which means that this was inevitable: Audacity 3.0 called spyware over data collection changes by new owner
The list of data includes the operating system and version, the user's country based on their IP address, non-fatal error codes and messages, crash reports, and the processor in use. Under data collected "for legal enforcement," the software collects "data necessary for law enforcement, litigation, and authorities' requests (if any)," though no specifically what data is collected in such cases.
The new owner is the same folks who own Musescore. I'm a Musescore subscriber, partially because it's a way to get MIDI files of sheet music I'm interested in for voice practice, but given that the Musescore web site is basically a sheet music piracy site, I'm wondering how this collaboration with law enforcement is gonna play out...