It is more than likely that many of you are fully aware that we have the possibility of using both paid and free commercial software. At this point we are going to focus on one of the most loved and used open source projects for years belonging to the second group, we refer to Audacity.
This is a program that basically focuses on audio editing. If there is something that characterizes this free software solution, it is the enormous number of functions that it offers us. This allows us, both at an end-user and a professional level, to carry out all kinds of work with our sound files. To all this, we can add the simplicity of use that it proposes for a large part of the available tasks.
All this means that it will not be necessary to have deep knowledge of this type of project to obtain very interesting results. Whatever the treatment, type of work or modification that we need to carry out in a file of this type, Audacity will probably be of great help to us. However, over the last few months this beloved application has been involved in a series of controversies related to the privacy of its users.
We say all this relatively recently the popular application was acquired by Muse Group . After this strategic move, some of its internal policies were modified, several of them related to telemetry or user data collection. You already know that this is an issue that has also generated enormous controversy in the Windows operating system and that reaches many other programs.
How Audacity Telemetry Affects Users
Many of the companies argue that this collection of data by their programs, as a movement to improve them in the future. However, users do not agree at all, or at least most of them. And it is that telemetry can be considered as one more element that threatens privacy when working with certain applications. This is precisely what is happening now with Audacity.
In this way, and after this change in both ownership and internal policies , the application collects data that it stores on remote servers. Here, a series of information related to the user is collected and stored, such as the functions used , the IP of our computer and more. In addition, as they acknowledge, these collected information can be shared at any time with third parties, which of course almost no one likes.
When asked if this is dangerous to our privacy, everything will depend on where we set our limits in this regard. There are many users who try to take maximum care of their privacy when working with the PC, so now Audacity could have become a dangerous software solution . On the other hand, there are many others who are not affected by this data collection at all. It is enough for them that the application itself continues to function correctly. At the same time, they don’t give much thought to telemetry, in which case Audacity remains the same as ever.
Be that as it may, many consider that this audio editor right now does not respect the rules of the open source software sector , so a modification is requested regarding this data collection.