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Comment by thenoblesunfish | Hacker News Reader

There is a meta-issue at play, as there is with many of these recurring stories that generate a lot of boring-to-read conversation. That is, "when is it acceptable to overreact to something?". Activism is based on the premise that it's acceptable when the cause is somehow good enough: one overreacts because most other people seem to be underreacting. This creates boring-to-read comment threads because (in the best case) half of the people are intentionally acting a bit unreasonably, and the other half are saying, "well, aren't you being a bit unreasonable?".

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I'm not sure this is overreaction.

Don't get me wrong, I've grabbed my pitchfork at times in the past and some of them have been massive overreactions but I think this is people saying "Oh ffs! Is nothing sacred?"

Audacity is now joining the ranks (yes, the scale is much different) of Google, Microsoft, <Insert Evil Corp Here>. Whether their intentions are evil or not (I don't believe they are in this case) is irrelevant.

For me, it's another nail in the coffin of owning my own stuff and not having to be connected all the time.

For example, why do I want to use an offline application that can potentially send information about me to foreign countries? What possible benefit is there for me in that?

Of course, I'd imagine that telemetry won't break my app if I don't connect to the internet but it's all part of a pattern of software becoming more and more about what the owners of the application can do to monetise me and what they can get away with (whether that's the plan for Audacity or not... they're still playing in the same field and can easily take a stand and say "we will never use telemetry").

Even if it's made to be opt-out, what happens if an update accidentally (or deliberately) switches it on again? Will it be "oops, sorry about that"!

What if I told you that it is, in fact, opt-out and explicitly made easy to disable in the build config? Don't you think it is a bit of an overreaction to say that "Audacity is now joining the ranks [...] of Google, Microsoft, <Insert Evil Corp Here>" when you haven't actually looked at the source of the issue?

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

> Don't you think it is a bit of an overreaction to say that "Audacity is now joining the ranks

No. I do not.

They now have the ability to take any data they want "accidentally". They can now give that data to whomever they want (it's in their Ts and Cs I believe) and even if you switch it off, what's to say they won't turn it on? What's stopping them selling the product to another company that now has a bunch of data.

It has not been needed up to this point. The product works. It works well. Why can't they send surveys? Or ask in a forum? Or ask users to download their alpha/beta/nightly version with the telemetry in it?

Once they get that data, they may want more!

If you read their responses and messages then they tell you exactly why they are interested in certain data and how they decided to respond to the outrage -- the _Audacity developer's responses_, not random people who are misinformed.

"Overreact" may be too loaded of a term to have used - I was trying to get at the idea of purposefully acting more strongly than one's usual default (which, for shear lack of time and energy if nothing else, is to remain silent on most things which are wrong with the world).

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