Hi,
Passing along the following article I got from another list.
   Jeanne


Audacity open source audio editor has become spyware
Ewdison Then - Jul 5, 2021, 12:47am CDT

One of open source software’s biggest strengths is, naturally, its
openness, which brings other benefits like freedom of use, security
through scrutiny,
flexibility, and more. That is mostly thanks to the open
source-friendly licenses these programs use, but, from time to time,
someone comes along and tries to make changes that infuriate the
community of users and developers. Sometimes, those changes can even
be illegal. Such seems to be the fate that has befallen Audacity, one
of the open source world’s most popular pieces of software that now
comes under a very invasive privacy policy.
The brouhaha started just a few months ago when Audacity was bought by
the Muse Group, the company behind equally popular music software like
MuseScore, which is also open source, and Ultimate Guitar. So far,
Audacity remains open source (and can’t really be changed into
proprietary software in its current form), but that doesn’t mean that
Muse Group can’t do some pretty damaging changes. Those changes come
in the form of the new privacy policy that was just updated a few days
ago, a policy that now allows it to collect user data.
As a desktop application with no core online functionality, Audacity
never had any need to “phone home” in the first place. Now the privacy
policy says that the new company does collect data and does so in a
way that’s both over-arching and vague, most likely by design. For
example, it says that it collects data necessary for law enforcement
but doesn’t specify what kind of data is collected.
There are also questions regarding the storage of data, which is
located in servers in the USA, Russia, and the European Economic Area.
IP addresses, for example, are stored in an identifiable way for a day
before being hashed and then stored in servers for a year. The new
policy also disallows people under the age of 13 from using the
software, which, as FOSS Post points out, is a violation of the GPL
license that Audacity uses.
The open source community was understandably irked by these changes.
Fortunately, Audacity is open source software, and it will most likely
be taken by the community and forked in a different direction, perhaps
with a different name. That will leave Muse Group to develop Audacity
on its own instead of being able to leverage (and exploit) the open
source community’s hard work.


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