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| Audacity Audio Editor has become a spyware |
Open-source audio editing software Audacity got close to spyware after collecting user data, sharing it with other companies and sending the data to Russia following privacy policy changes.
One of the greatest advantages of open source software is its openness, which brings more advantages such as freedom of use, security of review, flexibility, etc.
This is mainly due to the open source licenses that these programs use. But sometimes people try to make changes that upset the user community and developers.
Sometimes these changes may be illegal. This appears to be the fate of Audacity, one of the most popular programs in the world of open source, which is now vulnerable to abuse of privacy policies.
The turmoil began a few months ago when the Muse Group acquired Audacity, the company behind popular music software such as MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar.
Audacity remains open source as its current form in proprietary software cannot be changed. However, this does not mean that Muse Group cannot make harmful changes.
These changes were made in the form of a new privacy policy that was updated a few days ago. This is a policy that enables the collection of user data.
Audacity's Privacy Policy page has been around for more than 21 years and was updated on June 2nd to add content related to the collection of personal information.
Audacity turned into spyware
As a desktop application without basic online functionality, Audacity does not need to be connected to the Internet.
The data list contains the operating system, version, user country by IP address, message, error code, incident message and processor used.
The privacy policy now states that the new company collects data completely and obfuscated, which may be intentional.
For example, he said he was collecting data needed for law enforcement. However, it does not specify what type of data will be collected.
There are also questions about storing data on servers in the USA, Russia and the European Economic Area.
An IP address is stored so that it can be identified for one day, then hashed and then stored on the server for a year.
The new policy also prohibits anyone under 13 from using the software, which is inconsistent with the GPL used by Audacity.
There are now calls to split the software to prevent users who want to use free audio editing software from collecting data.