Two months ago the Muse Group (the commercial company behind Ultimate Guitar) unveiled the purchase of popular sound editor Audacity and which from that moment began to be developed together with other products of the new company.
At the time he mentioned that the plans for Audacity were the intention of hiring developers and designers to modernize the interface, improve usability and implement a non-destructive editing mode that will continue to be free for the community.
Initially, Audacity was designed only to run on a local system, without accessing external services through the network, but Muse Group plans to include tools in Audacity to integrate with cloud services, check for updates, send telemetry and reports with information on failures and errors.
After that and what a few days ago the users from the sound editor have noticed the publication of a privacy notice, They have announced their rejection of this, since it mentions that the application regulates issues related to the sending of telemetry and the processing of the user's accumulated information.
“The maintainers allowed it to be acquired by the trading company behind Ultimate Guitar. Ultimate Guitar has also acquired the open source music score composition software MuseScore.
For the most part, their biggest development assets have helped improve both programs objectively, but they are also starting to do this shit tracking data from commercial companies. " Comment a Reddit user
In addition, The Muse Group also tried to add code to report information about the launch of an application through Google and Yandex services. (the user was shown a dialog with a proposal to enable the sending of telemetry), but after a wave of discontent, this change was canceled.
“It is beginning to appear that Audacity and MuseScore were bought for the purpose of extending the domain of copyright infringement to the act of using these tools in an unauthorized manner.
Quote:• For legal compliance • Data necessary for compliance with the law, litigation and requests from the authorities (if any) • Legitimate interest of WSM Group to defend your legal rights and interests
From the above it is not clear what kind of legal application they have in mind. Telemetry advanced enough to enforce copyright is also advanced enough to be abused to steal the work of people without the necessary means or knowledge for legal recourse.
Will the instruments begin to listen to what is being played at the campfire to ensure that college students do not infringe on the "rights" of copyright holders? Will construction tools start to give away people who don't ask for proper union help to get the job done?
Where does this end? », Comment a ycombinator user
That is why two points of discontent are mainly discussed today on various websites, forums and social networks, which are:
- In the list of data that can be obtained during the telemetry collection process, in addition to parameters such as the hash of the IP address, the version of the operating system and the CPU model, the information required for law enforcement is mentioned , legal proceedings and requests from the authorities. The problem is that the wording is too general and the nature of the data specified is not detailed, that is, formally, the developers reserve the right to transfer any data if requested.
- Regarding the processing of telemetry data for its own purposes, it is established that the data will be stored on the territory of the European Union, but will be transferred for processing to offices located in Russia and the United States.
The rules state that the app is not intended for people under the age of 13. This clause may be construed as age discrimination, violating the terms of the GPLv2 license under which the Audacity code is provided.
Finally if you want to know more about it, you can check the details in the following link.
What is the last compilation we can trust?
version 3.0