Free voice editing software 'Audacity' announces 'collects data necessary for law enforcement', developers start 'fork of Audacity without data collection'

Free open source audio editing software ' Audacity ' has released a 'Privacy Policy' that summarizes new ways to collect and use your personal information. According to this privacy policy, Audacity maximizes user privacy, but 'collects data requested by law enforcement, proceedings, and authorities,' and risks collecting any type of data. It has been revealed that there is sex. Therefore, negative opinions such as 'There is no reason for online applications to collect data necessary for law enforcement' have sprung up on overseas bulletin boards, and even a project to fork Audacity that does not collect data has started. I will.

Desktop Privacy Notice | Audacity ®
https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/

On July 2, 2021 local time, Audacity announced that it would collect some personal information through a new privacy notice regarding data collection. Regarding the collection of personal information, Audacity has information on the OS name and version of the PC used by the user, the country of residence of the user based on the IP address, information on the CPU of the PC, non-fatal error code for 'application analysis / improvement'. It is supposed to collect information about messages and crash reports in Breakpad Mini Dump format. However, 'for law enforcement' only states that it collects 'necessary data in response to law enforcement, proceedings, and requests from authorities,' suggesting the possibility of collecting all kinds of data.

On the other hand, various opinions are coming out on the overseas bulletin boards Reddit and Hacker News. 'Personally, this is a classic misconception, and I think the developer's intention is to comply with the law as much as possible,' but 'the law that complies with it is that of Russia, which has a parent company. It's a law, 'some people said, saying that there was a sense of danger that personal information would be collected in accordance with Russian law.

Audacity may collect 'Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any)' according to new privacy notice: linux
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/od3h8b/audacity_may_collect_data_necessary_for_law/

The audacity of it! (Pun intended) Fork it, call it * Audacious * and be done with ... | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27727466

The beginning of the turmoil was the acquisition of Audacity by Muse Group. Along with this, there has been discussion with the community about changes to Audacity's Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

However, the new privacy policy was suddenly announced on July 2nd without any conclusions, and the developers commented that it was 'totally unacceptable'. Especially unacceptable is the item 'Collect data requested by law enforcement, proceedings, and authorities', 'It's completely ambiguous and can't tell me anything about what is being collected. There are also criticisms such as 'Hmm.' Chryseus commented, 'Data collection will not be accepted until it describes exactly what is being collected,' and recommends removing Audacity from your PC until this issue is resolved. ..

In addition, with the acquisition of Audacity by Muse Group, multiple changes are about to be made, and the implementation of opt-out type telemetry data collection code was also issued as a pull request, but this is from the developer side. There are many dissenting opinions and it is not implemented at the time of writing the article.

We've also started a project to fork Audacity to bring together volunteers to undo corrections to data collection.

GitHub --cookiengineer / audacity: Audacity Fork without any Sentry Telemetry or Crash Reporting.
https://github.com/cookiengineer/audacity