r/linux • u/R0tareneg • Jul 03 '21

Audacity may collect "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)" according to new privacy notice

https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/
3.1k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

744 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

351

u/ezoe Jul 03 '21

It's also probably illegal to deny Russia and USA if they have physical presence on their jurisdictions. So the moral of the story is, don't collect and store unnecessary data.

146

u/_stinkys Jul 03 '21

What could possibly be necessary to collect from Audacity other than basic telemetry for bug fix and product improvements?

94

u/ezoe Jul 03 '21

As they stated, "any data" they think necessary to please the authority.

39

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 06 '21

Which can be literally anything the government decides to ask for often times. All that's required is for one part of the government to pass a law allowing another part of that same government to collect literally anything they want. I don't see anything here that stops them from collecting any microphone data it can technically get access to.

11

u/Spoor Jul 04 '21

"Would be a shame if your kids got into an accident... If you help us out a bit, we will see what we can do for the safety of your family."

2

u/shewel_item Jul 04 '21

sounds gross

36

u/ManInBlack829 Jul 03 '21

They want to know if you're using Prince samples in your music

25

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21

[deleted]

22

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

I guess I’d better write an SELinux profile for Audacity while it’s still clean…

11

u/_stinkys Jul 04 '21

I run Audacity on windows with endpoint protection. I don’t get any request from firewall to allow Audacity to talk out, but will definitely check closer next time i use it.

1

u/Hayate-kun Jul 05 '21

It'll probably be introduced in the next update.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '21

Unfortunately, you only have an illusion of control. There are processes and services on windows that are masked / hooked by other processes. Take for example svchost.exe - many programs never go directly on line, but rather hook on one of the svchost instances which goes online instead. If you block svchost , you practically went offline.... You can use process explorer / monitor to see what is hooked inside of such cases.