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Comment by _d7dt | Hacker News Reader

I assume you have not read these type of privacy policies before, but it's extremely common for web sites and online services to disallow children under 13, at least in the US because of COPPA compliance. In general, it is illegal for commercial entities operating in the US to collect data on children under 13 (although in some cases there are some exceptions). See for example the Github privacy policy which includes a similar clause: https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-privacy...

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Yes, seems like a pretty strong indication that telemetry is bad. Which is the point. Which is why we are all going to use the fork now.

I'm not sure what you mean, these laws aren't strictly concerning telemetry. Did you mean that telemetry is bad because children under 13 years old could accidentally use it? If so, that's the purpose of the law -- to prevent that. You can sue a company that is found to be unlawfully collecting data on children.

Spyware by any name is bad, and this law acknowledges it, so far as to protect children.

Generally, no, that's not what that law in the US is acknowledging. It doesn't make any special consideration for any definition of "spyware" or any other similar concept, it talks about all kinds of data collection, including ones that would be otherwise voluntary and beneficial for an adult. There might be some other US law that talks about that, but COPPA doesn't.

It’s audio editing software. Kids should be allowed to use audio editing software freely. If the law requires no-one collect data on kids, stop collecting data from kids rather than tell kids they can’t use the software. That way, adults and kids have the ability to use the software.

Leaving the data collection on all the time, makes data-collection part of the terms of use of the software. Which makes data-collection part of the business model. Which makes the software spyware. It is always watching you.

If I followed you around all day, you’d label me a stalker, If I didn’t approach you, didn’t proactively threaten you, didn’t tell anyone else what I knew about you, you could still legally bring sone level of force against me. How is constant telemetry any different?

If you think that collecting anything from your users that would put you in violation of COPPA should a child decide to use a local application against local data on a local computer is appropriate in any way, you probably ought to think again. There is no justifiable need, period.

Telemetry for Audacity is bad because it precludes children from using the software without any real reason.

This is a perfect example of how the less money you charge, the worse your users will behave. Audacity is collecting crash reports. Plenty of software collects crash reports. Crash reports are necessary for building reliable desktop software.

For some reason free (gratis) software attracts the most entitled users ever. If I were in charge of Audacity I'd be inclined to charge a $1 "distribution fee" just to weed these users out.

Users will behave? Someone missed the point of libre software. A primary tenet is trust.

I don't think this is an example of entitled users.

I think rather it is rather an example of an external company (Muse group) not understanding the community behind the piece of software they have taken over.

Why is the crash report collecting information about children, and not filtering out the information so only information about the software is collected?

It's just ass-covering legal boilerplate the same as how some software says that you can't use it in a nuclear power facility.

While that is possible, I strongly suspect that in Audacity case it is because they are outsourcing the data collecting to google analytic services, and google uses the personal data as payment for the service.

They could do the data collection themselves and chose not to store personal identifiable information, in which case they can remove the legal boilerplate since it won't be needed. This suggestion naturally already exist in the GitHub issue.

Free as in freedom software produces even more entitled users, since we are entitled to fork the project and do it differently.

> it's extremely common for web sites and online services

This - audacity - is supposed to be a bloody offline desktop app.

I'm not sure what you mean. It can still be operated offline, in which case there is no telemetry sent. The analytics is just another service that you can use.

OFFLINE.

No connection to ANY online service, including telemetry.

That is what I meant.

Audacity is not a website or online service. It's a completely offline audio editing program that has worked fine without telemetry for over twenty years. My kids were using it just fine, and now they're suddenly not allowed to and the only difference is the telemetry.

Doesn't matter how common it is. There is no practical need for collecting that data and... *puff* the obstacle magically disappears.

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