

While Audacity is nothing more than a desktop program, its developers want to make it phone home with various data taken from users’ machines. The parent company is a multi-national company and it has been trying to start a data-collection mechanism in the software. The same company owns other projects in its portfolio such as Ultimate Guitar (Famous website for Guitar enthuisasts) and MuseScore (Open source music notation software).Įver since, Audacity has been a heated topic. The famous open source audio manipulation program was acquired by a company named Muse Group two months ago.

For example, IP addresses are stored in an identifiable way for a day before being hashed and then stored in servers for a year, leaving users identifiable via government data requests. In few moments, you will see that Playing Audio troubleshooter has found some problems and fixed them. Click on Run next to Playing Audio troubleshooter. Under System, go to Troubleshoot > Other troubleshooters. The storage of said data is located in servers in the U.S., Russia, and the European Economic Area. This in-built tool can find and fix audio problems automatically. More concerning perhaps is the inclusion of a vague section listing data that must be collected "for legal enforcement, litigation, and authorities' requests (if any)." The type of data collected now includes the computer's processor, operating system and version, the user's IP address, and any crash reports, fatal error codes and messages generated by their machine. According to Fosspost, changes to the privacy policy section on the Audacity website indicate that several personal data collection mechanisms have since been added by the parent company. Two months ago, Audacity was acquired by Muse Group, which owns other audio-related projects including the Ultimate Guitar website and the MuseScore app.
Source audio editor has become spyware software#
Popular open-source audio editing software Audacity is facing "spyware" allegations from users for recent privacy policy changes that suggest the desktop app is collecting user data and sharing it with third parties, including state regulators where applicable.
Source audio editor has become spyware code#
Q: Will someone fork the code and strip out the "Phone Home" code? Q: Is this something to be concerned about? Audacity is something I only use on occasion. Audacity open source audio editor has become spyware.One of open source software’s biggest strengths is, naturally, its openness, which brings other benefits. Yesterday, I read three articles on Audacity and how it is now possible spyware under its new owners.
