NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
I have some disappointing news for all audiophiles and other similar long-time users: The long time and much respected open-source audio editing program, Audacity, has more or less turned itself into spyware. To elaborate, a while back the development team were bought out by some company called MuseGroup. When the news originally came out, some were worried that the program wouldn't be the same. Thanks to this news, those concerns were validated: the plucky little 20 year old program that has been a long-time stalwart of open-source software that many have been using for over a decade has become what some had originally feared: A corporate product that wants to treat you as the product by sucking up your user data. In the latest version of Audacity, they've switched up their Privacy Policy to include spying on your hardware for the purposes of "Law Enforcement" and don't tell you anything much more specific than that. It also allows MuseGroup and its associates to take note of your computer build, your OS, your IP address, your country location and sell your data to the highest bidder much like what Facebook and similar apps and sites do. Oh and the best part: They're sending your data to their headquarters in fucking Russia of all places. The most secure and definitely not-at-all sketchy epicentre of shonky Internet practices in any way!
"All your personal data is stored on our servers in the European Economic Area (EEA). However, we are occasionally required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA."
-Audacity's new Privacy Policy, Section 7
Here's a peek at who's going to have access to your data:
Another interesting aside is because of this new change, the software now has to restrict itself from being used by people under the age of 13, which naturally violates its own GPL licence agreement it uses, so there's a well-earned can of worms the bastards will have to wrestle with now.
Fortunately because Audacity's software has been open-source for two decades, you can bet your arse there are some cunning programmers out there coding up some forks right now and there's already some chatter about it going on across GitHub and Reddit. There is some slight good news too: This is all regarding the NEW version of the software. If you're currently using an older version, keep it! It doesn't "talk" back to the developers and feed them your info. I personally haven't updated my version of Audacity because I haven't needed to. Now I guess I never will. I'm probably going to start looking for an alternative at some point, but there's a little bit of solace for you regarding this development.
Disappointing news all round. I've personally found this handy little program to be quite intuitive and powerful whenever I've had cause to use it. Another fine piece of software ruined by corporate greed and arrogance.
"All your personal data is stored on our servers in the European Economic Area (EEA). However, we are occasionally required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA."
-Audacity's new Privacy Policy, Section 7
Here's a peek at who's going to have access to your data:
Another interesting aside is because of this new change, the software now has to restrict itself from being used by people under the age of 13, which naturally violates its own GPL licence agreement it uses, so there's a well-earned can of worms the bastards will have to wrestle with now.
Fortunately because Audacity's software has been open-source for two decades, you can bet your arse there are some cunning programmers out there coding up some forks right now and there's already some chatter about it going on across GitHub and Reddit. There is some slight good news too: This is all regarding the NEW version of the software. If you're currently using an older version, keep it! It doesn't "talk" back to the developers and feed them your info. I personally haven't updated my version of Audacity because I haven't needed to. Now I guess I never will. I'm probably going to start looking for an alternative at some point, but there's a little bit of solace for you regarding this development.
Disappointing news all round. I've personally found this handy little program to be quite intuitive and powerful whenever I've had cause to use it. Another fine piece of software ruined by corporate greed and arrogance.