The Audacity, very popular audio editing software, mainly because it is an open source application, was accused of becoming spyware which sends user data to its developers in Russia and the United States, after sale to a multinational software developer for musicians.
According to the FOSS Post, Audacity was purchased by Muse Group, a developer of audio editing and processing software, in May of this year. After the purchase, the company updated the application’s privacy policy, explaining that Audacity now collects various types of data from its users.. The data policy change, published on the Audacity website on Saturday (07/3), was discovered by the FOSS Post this Monday (07/05).
According to the document, the Muse Group collects and sends information such as operating system details, user location, IP, machine configuration, error logs and “data needed for law enforcement, litigation and law enforcement requests” and other data for servers in the US and Russia.
As the FOSS Post reports, the questionable Audacity update has generated negative reactions from its users in communities on GitHub and Reddit. But, It is important to remember that, as it is an open source application, it is still possible to use previous versions of the tool (which do not collect and analyze this data). To do this, just look for old versions in open source software repositories or simply don’t update the tool.
“By doing these suspicious activities, the people behind Audacity and the Muse Group have proven themselves untrustworthy by the open source community. and therefore software must be abandoned and eliminated from the repositories of Linux distributions,” writes the FOSS Post, a news and content site specializing in Linux systems and open source applications.
Sources: FOSS Post, Audacity (Privacy Policy), TheHack.
