Feedback: Do NOT add Telemetry

Your users are asking you to NOT add Telemetry! How are you not seeing this?

We have seen it.
Thank you.

steve wrote:

We have seen it.
Thank you.

The Audacity user base does NOT want it, so I do not believe that you “have seen it”.
This PR (https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835) has NOT been closed, so you’re obviously not “seeing it”.

Would you call me a liar to my face?
Please keep your comments on topic and respectful of other forum users and crew.

My apologies as I’m not here to be disrespectful. I will however argue that you all are being disrespectful to the whole Audacity community by even considering integrating Telemetry after the users are clearly asking you not to.

  1. The proposed feature came before the objections.
  2. You are greatly exaggerating the opposition to the use of telemetry.

Millions of people chose to send crash reports via telemetry for all manner of applications, including many open source apps. The problem is not “telemetry” in itself, but rather a matter of ensuring that it is implemented for a valid reason (to improve the software and bring benefits to users of that software), and is done in an open and honest way that fully respects the privacy of the users.

You may be interested to know that Audacity’s blind community have asked for data about screen reader usage to be included in the telemetry.

While I agree that there are legitimate concerns about the code that has been put forward, that’s a very different matter to totally ruling out the use of telemetry in any shape or form.

While you might not have an issue with telemetry in the software you use, I’m sure you know at this point that I do. There are many others in the community who also have the same exact issue. There’s always the option to create MuseDacity with the Chrome browser engine running underneath it with all the networks :slight_smile: Seriously though, Audacity is very solid. Currently it’s installed in Tails OS by default, but will be removed if this PR is implemented. There are a lot of people who value Tails and it’s cool that Audacity is already there :slight_smile:

Update: The pull request was rejected.

I think you may not be paying attention to the amount of posts, and videos spun off about this issue. There is no exaggeration here. Had Audacity proposed an open source telemetry option, you would have had community support. But you are getting into bed with Google, at a time when people are moving away from Google tracking and choosing to remove their digital fingerprint. I think this is shooting the Audactiy Project in the foot. I can see a fork coming or people contributing ot Kwave instead.

Also the Telemetry is not anonymous, as soon as you have IP address and UUID you have a way to track a user. People have been using many browser options to block google ‘anonymous’ fingerprinting.

Nobody trusts Google, so having a button that says opt-in or opt-out, nobody is going to trust that that actually works.

Update: The pull request was rejected.