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Comment by zxzax | Hacker News Reader

I'm saddened that it's necessary to bother posting this, but Ardour also has a similar privacy policy, which you should read if you intend to use their services: https://ardour.org/privacy.html

Ardour also has a compile time optional "phone home" feature which checks for update announcements, so you should disable that when building if you care about this sort of thing: https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/blob/13f5fb3dee640f0bfb1d66...

Personal note: I do not consider these things to be issues with Ardour, or with Audacity. I commend PaulDavisThe1st and x42 and the rest of the Ardour contributors, as well as the Audacity developers, for their respective work on these two excellent projects.

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I just read the entire privacy policy and not only is the entirety completely reasonable and barely worth mentioning, the “phone home” section is just this: “ If you download and use a ready-to-run version of Ardour from ardour.org, the program will attempt to contact ardour.org at startup to determine if you should be notified about a new release of the software. If the computer where you use Ardour is connected to the internet, this process will store the computer's internet address and an identifier for its operating system.” So it’s barely an http access log for whatever endpoint that is. The privacy policy hysteria has gone wayyyyyy too far.

The thing is at least from what I can gather, the Audacity issue is literally on the same level of this. The only added difference is optional bug reporting.

Optional, opt-in error reporting and telemetry, yes. This entire issue is a bunch of people freaking out over nothing and making baseless assertions about things that aren't happening.

> the program will attempt to contact ardour.org at startup to determine if you should be notified about a new release of the software

I remember one developer who actually used a DNS TXT record to store the latest version, which I always thought was an interesting idea.

Store update information in place that is unencrypted and unauthenticated most of the time? What could go wrong?

The worst that could happen is that someone isn't informed about a newer version, or the software attempts to download a newer version and receives a 404 instead. They're storing numbers, not URLs.

It's possible to authenticate TXT records, you just have to do it yourself.

I think the difference here is that it’s a pre-existing condition that is explained. There is no license change to adapt to. What Audacity is doing may be perfectly reasonable, but they are presenting it in the worst possible way.

And, while not all software requires submission of personal information, those that do are usually required to hand over information when required by law enforcement. It’s just a fact of life. If you don’t like that, then don’t use or register that software.

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