Telemetry and error reporting are opt-in. Error reporting uses industry-standard Sentry (also an OSS), which is not a nefarious data seller. Auto-update checked are opt-count and send a very basic user-agent with less data than an average web browser HTTP request. There is no spying here.
Yeah maybe by modern software which doesn't respect the user's privacy and resource usage it's nothing to worry about.
I'd say this is a regression, and adding all that networking code makes it easier for them to push it further down the line, and adds more vectors for attacks.
At best it's bloat. Developers were able to write good software without pulling in user's data before, it says more about the devs if they think it's so necessary.
Okay say it's not spying—you now have another app on your system pinging hosts, and depending on how much you trust Muse, you have to check the changelog every time to ensure they haven't added more bloat or juiced up the telemetry.
I'd posit that spying has been normalised we don't even recognise it anymore. Opt-in isn't a get out of jail free card, since your avg user will just click whatever.
Can't you just turn off auto update and not get this?
FFS, any time you connect to a website they know your IP address. A log will save it, perhaps, and they say they prune their logs after 24 hours which is reasonable.
Literally wget sends this sort of info, you can try it
wget -d example.com
unless now wget is spyware too. This whole thing is a nothingburger at best and just a pr disaster at worst.
You're comparing web tools/browsers to an offline audio editor.
Though I agree it's a PR disaster—people are upset, I don't think folks can be reasoned with since it's partly a backlash of yet another small community being taken over by corporate mediocrity.
People are not getting the point. If you have to download the software they will get this info, full stop. There is no way that they won't get your user agent. That's what this privacy policy refers to. Same if you download auto-updates, you have to download the updates from the internet which requires connecting to their webserver, and they'll get this information.
As for the telemetry, that's opt-in. May be the bloat and other things that are being mentioned are about that? But for the first two bullets on information that is mentioned as collected (IP addr and os info) that is mentioned in the linked github discussion, they are literally what they will get because you had to visit their site to download it or because you automatically download updates.
'Anyone who says "full stop" is an idiot, full stop.'
One of the more common ways to get audacity (via your distribution) happens to [often] not provide your/a user agent string to the audacity developers, nor do they get a copy of your ip. In the context of a distribution: the auto-update mechanism is also problematic and needs to be disabled at install time.
And all of this is
a) reinventing the wheel.
b ) breaks the assumption that the computer will only connect to the network with a human-in-the-loop.
c) completely unnecessary in the first place.
Let the distributions keep track of issues and report them upstream.
What about users who don't download it via their distribution package managers (for example because their distributions ship very old versions of Audacity)?
I’m sorry I really don’t get the privacy issue here. It automatically checks for updates, most apps do, and in doing so it appears in the logs for a webserver (and I’m pretty sure most sysadmins want to retain access and error logs)
The error reporting is by an open-source tool and is opt-in.
