Is Audacity now collecting user data?

Feedback and Discussion Forum Audacity 3.x Feedback and Reviews
1

Hi all,

I see there was a similar post, but for reasons I can only guess, it has been locked.
I’m referring to the news that Audacity has been acquired by Muse (or what ever they are called) and now share some user data
with government agencies and other unspecified parties.
[Edited by admin]

2

The reason that it has been locked is because of the huge amount of spamming, trolling and even death threats that have occurred elsewhere.
This is a community forum and as the forum administrator I will not allow such behaviour to disrupt this community resource.

I have edited your post because it is off-topic for this forum.
Please see this topic for more information: Do you collect user data under the new owners?

As you (Paul2) are now a regular contributor to this forum, you are welcome to discus this matter with my via PM.

3

The reason that it has been locked is because of the huge amount of spamming, trolling and even death threats that have occurred elsewhere.
This is a community forum and as the forum administrator I will not allow such behaviour to disrupt this community resource.

I did suspect the main reason was some sort of backlash, just didn’t realize that people where that upset by it.
As you can tell, I too am upset, but to issue a death threat, that is just plain madness.

I have edited your post because it is off-topic for this forum.

Fair enough.

As you (Paul2) are now a regular contributor to this forum, you are welcome to discus this matter with my via PM.

Thank you Steve.

4

That is false.
Currently (up to and including Audacity 3.0.2), no user data is collected at all. The app does not have the ability to connect to the Internet at all. We don’t even know how many Audacity users there are, let alone any information about them :wink:

It looks like a future version of Audacity will have the ability to check for updates and submit crash reports. Obviously this will require the app to go on line and connect to one of Audacity’s servers. To deliver the correct update, and to provide useful crash reports requires a certain amount of information to be sent to the server, and such on-line transactions are legally regulated in many countries in which Audacity operates. Of course Audacity will have to comply with such legal requirements.

Some facts that I have gathered so far from looking at the development code:

  • Update checking will have a setting in Preferences to turn it on / off.
  • Crash reporting is similar to crash reporting in Firefox and many other apps: If there is a crash, a crash report is generated. The crash report is shown to the user and they are asked if they want to send it or not (that is, it is entirely optional whether you send crash reports or not).
  • When you build Audacity from the source code, update checking, submitting crash reports, and all networking is disabled by default. If you want to enable them you have to explicitly add three options when compiling.
5

Thank you Steve for clarification on some of the issues.
I will leave it here and discuss via PM.

EDIT:

Just sent you a PM, but it seems to have vaporised into thin air.
Please tell me you received it.

6

No, not received it. I’ll try sending one to you.
Update: Just discovered that the System Administrator was fixing a problem in the forum software, so that may be why your PM vaporised.

7

OK, got your PM, have replied.

8

UPDATE:

The Audacity desktop app privacy notice was updated today. The full, updated notice can be read here: https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/

Note that the privacy policy refers only to future versions of Audacity. Up to and including the current Audacity 3.0.2 there is no privacy notice because the app does not have networking and so is incapable of sharing data.