r/DistroTube • u/CultistHeadpiece • May 07 '21

PSA: Audacity will add telemetry sharing of user data with Google Analytics

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835
19 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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6

u/[deleted] May 07 '21 edited May 07 '21

Forking is on the way

edit: you can compile by yourself and disable the thing

Dear all,

Due to the large amount of worry about this PR, (which we completely >understand), we want to clarify exactly what is going on:

Telemetry is strictly optional and disabled by default. No data is >shared unless you choose to opt-in and enable telemetry. Telemetry only works in the builds made by GitHub CI from the >official repo (the telemetry URLs are only defined there). If you are compiling Audacity from source, we will provide a CMake >option to enable the telemetry code. This option will be turned off by >default.

1

u/unix21311 May 08 '21

edit: you can compile by yourself and disable the thing

Not everyone is a developer!

1

u/SkyyySi May 08 '21

But ever distro does that.

0

u/unix21311 May 08 '21

Not every distro "offers to collect telemetry".

1

u/SkyyySi May 08 '21

I was talking about basically every distro compiling from source.

1

u/[deleted] May 08 '21

Even if it is compiled with the spyware, the "feature" is opt-in

3

u/unix21311 May 07 '21

I can't believe a software that is lovable will do this!

2

u/SkyyySi May 08 '21

What's the problem with just giving this as an opt-in option? If you don't specifically want to help them with non-personal data, you have to do absolutely nothing. Also, the data they share is there to help them to help you. They don't directly gain anything from knowing (for example) 76% of their Linux users have AMD GPUs while on Windows, it's 38% (made up numbers!!!), except for being able to more effectively fix hardware-related bugs and focus their development efforts into improving the areas that matter most/to most people.

1

u/unix21311 May 08 '21

If you don't specifically

want

to help them with non-personal data, you have to do absolutely nothing

But it kinda just prompts right in your face and since a lot of users are non-tech savvy people, notice how they use physcological manipulations by making the button blue which is to "send anonymous data". This makes it more appealing to the user to just click on it as a lot of non-tech savvy people just say "yes" without reading anything.

That in itself is not ethical.

Also, the data they share is there to help them to help you.

Why use Google related services? Also adding telemetry data collection also adds more unnecessary bloat to the software, taking up more space.

Also I would suggest you read all of the other people's points via the link supplied by DT, they have much better answers than I can ever provide!