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Audacity 'Spyware' Claims Follow Privacy Policy Changes By New Owner
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I have 3.0.2 installed and as far as I can tell it makes no attempt to connect to the internet and never has. Even when I "check for updates" it just opens a browser window on their download page.
This kind of data seems very typical to collect and not bad at all. It's the phrase about law enforcement that's spooky.
But all my favorite YouTubers have told me that I'll get h4ck3d if I don't use a VPN!
Well, the agreement didn't have that wording before, and they were doing just fine. If they don't want outrage, they ought to get rid of the blanket statement about law enforcement.
How are you verifying that the next layer in your Tor onion connection isn't collecting your traffic?
For anyone who's interested.
arstechnica.com
No, open source Audacity audio editor is not “spyware”
The community’s telemetry concerns were received and addressed two months ago.
arstechnica.com
Ars Technica has a balanced article, with no hysteria:
arstechnica.com
No, open source Audacity audio editor is not “spyware”
The community’s telemetry concerns were received and addressed two months ago.
arstechnica.com
CDM appears to have also done a deep dive into this and helped tamp down the concerns - https://cdm.link/2021/07/audacity-m...and-theres-not-reason-to-dump-the-editor-yet/. Sounds like if you have Ultimate GuitarTab installed on your iPad already (which Muse Group owns) that you have the same risk with Audacity. So either uninstall everything from Muse Group and stick with Audacity 3.0.2 or accept that a company that has legal considerations across the globe needs to start including language in the EULAs as they head towards trying to take the software in a new direction.
You don’t need to. I suggest reading up on how it all works. I have posted links in this thread, but there are many more just a few clicks away.
I can't find em, and somehow the top Google results explain it really poorly, so here's the best source, the project's own page: https://2019.www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en#thesolution
Your client knows every hop in the path and encrypts the data such that only the last hop can decrypt it. The last hop can see the data but only knows the last hop's address, not the original. Of course, if the attacker manages to control every hop, you're hosed, but that's hard.
Seems pretty safe, but the real issue I've experienced using Tor is so many people use it abusively that many sites lock you out fully or partially. If anything uses reCaptcha, it will stop you and make you fill out like 4 of them. Tor also blocks a lot of scripting etc for your own privacy, but that can break sites too.
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To complement the previous info, the developer didn't receive the prize 'recently' but in 2014.
Anyway, his merits and academic credentials are impressive to say the least. He even received the Order of the British Empire, so you might want to call him 'Sir'
: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Hairer
Ah, it was the "Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics" that I was thinking of (but mis-remembering). I was sure that it was recent.To complement the previous info, the developer didn't receive the prize 'recently' but in 2014.
Anyway, his merits and academic credentials are impressive to say the least. He even received the Order of the British Empire, so you might want to call him 'Sir'
There is no need to even have a privacy policy if you don’t collect the data in the first place, and if they want a crash reporting feature then users should only be asked to agree to the privacy terms if and when they opt in to crash reporting... at which stage they should also be told exactly what is being collected.
Problem is (as per the article you linked) the crash reporting is opt-out and it looks like they’ve put a vague, open-ended, take-it-or-leave-it policy in the standard EULA. 2 minutes research would have told them that wouldn’t go down well with the open-source community. This in a a bit of software that has survived for a decade or two without automatic crash reporting.
Thing is, most of us typical Mac users already concede far more to Google, Microsoft and Apple et. al. every time we install a bit of proprietary software and decide that life is too short to read the whole EULA so this seems a bit trivial. We should probably care a bit more - people who do care turn to open source and Linux to avoid this sort of thing and are understandably paranoid about it.
Just wanted to thanks for this comment. As a VPN illiterate these type of points are quite informative for real. Didn’t cross my mind at all.