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Audacity Telemetry

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 7th of May 2021 11:53:59 PM Filed under
Software
  • Audacity Telemetry and Why Free Software Means Better Privacy

    Many people accept that free software tends to protect your privacy better than proprietary alternatives, but they may not understand why that is. This week’s news about the Audacity project adding telemetry and the public outcry is a perfect test case to explore why free software means better privacy. If you haven’t been following the story, this piece in The Register provides a good summary. In short, Audacity (audio editing software) published a pull request to add telemetry about their users as an opt-in feature to a future release. The free software community largely balked at this change and started a debate over the change inside the pull request.

    To better understand why free software protects your privacy more than proprietary software, let’s contrast a few key points in this story with how it would play out with a proprietary counterpart.

    [...]

    Another crucial part of this story is that when the Audacity developers were explaining the change, they also pointed out that collecting telemetry is opt in. Defaults are powerful and an application that automatically collects your data without your permission is much different than an application that only does it if you explicitly tell it to do so. The fact that they designed this feature to be opt in further underscores the fact that because this was free software, they had a different obligation to their users. They understood their users would dislike the change and would outright reject it if it were opt out.

  • 'A massive middle finger': Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture

    A UUID stored on the local machine would be used to identify sessions and web analytics service Yandex Metrica used to estimate daily active users.

    "Telemetry collection is optional and configurable at any time," he added.

    The change has not gone down well. At time of writing it had attracted over 2,000 "thumbs down" emojis, while a mere 39 users clicked "thumbs up." Hardly a ringing endorsement.

    Telemetry collection is an area that causes much gnashing of teeth and twisting of knickers in the open source community. While some see it as a pointless invasion of privacy, others find it invaluable for solving issues or identifying how people use a product.

»

Audacity reverses course on plans to add opt-in telemetry

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 17th of May 2021 02:05:36 PM.
  • Audacity reverses course on plans to add opt-in telemetry after outcry

    What a busy few weeks it has been for the venerable audio editor Audacity.

    At the end of April, it was announced that Muse Group had acquired the editor, with Muse pledging Audacity would remain "forever free and open source".

    "I'm proud of how Audacity has achieved so much success over the years, but there are many features and user interface improvements that I've always wanted Audacity to have, but were difficult to achieve as a small, community-supported project," Audacity co-founder Dominic Mazzoni said at the time.

    Muse Group head of creative software Martin Keary said the contributor community were the "heart and soul of Audacity and our job is to make their lives easier by providing design and development support".

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