Articles is from July 8th. This is a fast moving story.
The current state of affairs (from Muse Group's perspective) is here: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/1353 (published today)
The current state of affairs (from Muse Group's perspective) is here: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/1353 (published today)
I really don't get the wailing and gnashing of teeth against even the principle of adding update checking and error reporting features. Real, regular people will get tangible benefits from these features. Their scope is so limited and implementation (now) drawn down to such a sharp point I can't really sympathize with a hard-line counterposition that these features must be defacto evil.
Sometimes this gets mixed with observations that telemetry and auto-updates are modern-day antipatterns, encouraging bad software development practices and resulting in subpar products.
Personally, I feel that a ToS/privacy policy for Audacity would be more palatable if it explicitly limited scope of data collection to optional features of update checks and error reports.
Beyond that, there's nothing that requires them to allow for this in their TOS. There's no loose end by not including it; it's not a 't' to be crossed or an 'i' to be dotted.
I'm eager to be corrected, but I just don't see why they'd need to change the TOS at all except to replace some ownership info.
• You must acknowledge that privacy is a basic human right.¹ Maybe you were brought up in a culture where these rights don't count; well, here's your opportunity to learn and grow. Maybe you have simply forgotten your school lessons, that's not good and the blame falls squarely on your shoulders then.
• The users were promised UI improvements and an eighth zoom button, instead they got malicious software and bad treatment from the new owners.
• Look at what Muse originally planned, not what they compromised to after the public push-back.
• There is a person at Muse named Daniel Ray who is a sociopath and lacks the basic decency/internal filter in communicating with other people and utter lack of self-preservation for avoiding bad consequences for himself, such that he thinks that threatening a software developer on public Github with doxxing him into the gulag is an acceptable thing to do.
¹ Let's see how these rephrases violating some other human rights feel: "I really don't get the wailing and gnashing of teeth against even the principle of forced castration and hysterectomy." "I really don't get the wailing and gnashing of teeth against even the principle of trading and using chattel slaves."
>I have been doing 3.0.3 Release Candidate testing and all seems good:
>a) error and crash reporting are one-off opt-in each time you get such a dialog,
>b) the update checking dialog that you get on initial launch of 3.0.3 enables you to turn off update checking in Application prefs BEFORE you hit the OK button - and thus no data is sent.
Everything is now as opt-in as it can be expected to, and the privacy policy has nothing untoward in it. I'm not super happy with how long it took to get to this point, but at least the wound has been debrided.
This point is very important. Like many other open source projects, Audacity is used in a very large number of education-related projects. Having 13 as the minimum age was going to be a huge problem.
> The App we provide is not intended for individuals below the age of 13. If you are under 13 years old, please do not use the App.
They did not forbid it.
What has the law to do with offline apps on a personal computer owned by a family home when the machine is supposed to be "family machine". The next thing you know windows will forbid ages 13 and below from using their products?
Its not like there are dangers of pedos by using audacity? What about "YouTube kids"? How is that allowed when its online with automated content moderation but audacity is not for kids?
and it was shared 2 weeks ago also. Best to move along to more current developments.
Discussion on the mentioned Latest Update https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27927407