Audacity has turned evil

[madfilkentist]

I'm not sure where the right place to post this is. I've made my personal journal mostly private, and this needs to get out to as many people as possible. A lot of filkers use Audacity for home audio production, so I think it's sufficiently on topic here.

Audacity, the popular audio editing application, is now Russian spyware.

What? you ask. Has madfilkentist gone mad? Read Audacity's desktop privacy notice.

First, the data controller for the app is "WSM Group with registered office at Moskovsky pr-t,40-1301, Kaliningrad, Russia, 236004." Second, the notice says WSM collects data including "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)." Bear in mind that Audacity isn't an online service but a desktop application which you run on your own files. Bear in mind that Russia's laws don't care much about anyone's privacy, except as something to get around.

If the Russian government wants to run mass surveillance on Audacity users, for whatever crazy purpose, WSM Group will be within its stated bounds to provide access to your computer.

If you have Audacity, I recommend either getting rid of it or avoiding all updates. It's likely someone will fork the application, since it's open source and popular. This could take a while, though.

Comments

[tei]

UGH! I use Audacity for podcastin and… well, anything else audio-related, even if it’s just little clips… this is awful, thank you for the PSA!

[mdlbear]

cookiengineer/audacity: Audacity Fork without any Sentry Telemetry or Crash Reporting. No idea whether this will end up the "official" fork, but it'll do for now.

[bunsen_h]

When did the change occur?

[madfilkentist]

I learned about it from a discussion in #techtalk on Filkhaven, and I'm trying to figure out the timeline myself. You can trace it back to the acquisition of Audacity by a somewhat mysterious company called MuseGroup. Over the next couple of weeks they announced plans to incorporate Google Analytics into the app, promoting a wide-scale protest that made MuseGroup back off. The new announcement about giving several forms of vaguely defined access to people's use of the application is just a few days old.

I have Audacity 2.4.1 on my Mac. As far as I can tell (and I haven't done any deep testing), it's unaffected by this as long as I don't upgrade.

[bunsen_h]

Huh. Muse Group also owns MuseScore. I'll have to try to find out if the same shenanigans apply there too.

[gorgeousgary]

So for those of us who are not expert programmers and think "git" is something cowboys say in westerns, what's a good suggestion for an inexpensive and user-friendly alternative?