Has Audacity become spyware?

Spyware! the term is strong and it is the name which circulates on the forums of the developers to characterize the famous software audio editing Audacity. The free tool is from theuniverse of free software and it allows you to record sound, mix it and make corrections. A real must-have Swiss Army knife foraudio. But, lately, the software was bought by the publisher Muse Group and its terms of use have changed dramatically. It is precisely these new conditions that have engendered the wrath of the community of developers on the channel. Github d’Audacity.

With the new rules, Muse Group can effectively collect informations on the operating system and its version, the reference of the processor used, the IP address for geolocation, Audacity error codes and crash reports. Nothing very extraordinary compared to what others are doing applications, like Facebook for example. Even Mozilla’s Firefox practices the same kind of data collection and processing to improve the Navigator.

A flash in the pan

But, for free software, what makes the community bristle is the data collected that can potentially be shared with third parties and especially be hosted and analyzed by Google and Yandex. The developers therefore called for a boycott, and sometimes gave the name of spyware to Audacity. FossPost, a medium specialized in free software even asks to uninstall it urgently. Under the pression, Muse Group revised its copy and promised to self-host the data rather than exploiting tool libraries and hosting from third parties like Google or Yandex.

In addition, the firm announced that the deactivation of this telemetry is easy to do. A decision that seems to have lowered the level of tension with this community. It should be noted that the application of this new policy was only to come into force with version 3.0.3 of the software. This is not yet available and, for the moment, the current version 3.0.2 is not affected by these new conditions.