The personal data being collected as outlined in the first five bullet points is not particularly broad-in fact, it's quite similar to the collected data described in FOSSPost's own privacy policy: IP address, browser user-agent, 'some other cookies your browser may provide us with,' and (by way of WordPress and Google analytics) 'your geographical location, cookies for other websites you visited or any other information your browser can give about you.' Legitimate interest of WSM Group to defend its legal rights and interests Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any).Legitimate interest of WSM Group to offer and ensure the proper functioning of the app

Crash reports in Breakpad MiniDump format.

Non-fatal error codes and messages (e.g.

User country (geolocated by public IP address).

The privacy policy, which was last updated on July 2, outlines the data which the app may collect: Personal data collected The root of both sites' concern is the privacy policy instigated by new Audacity owner Muse Group, who already published open source music notation tool MuseScore. The claimsįOSS-focused personal technology site SlashGear declares that although Audacity is free and open source, new owner Muse Group can 'do some pretty damaging changes'-specifically meaning its new privacy policy and telemetry features, described as 'overarching and vague.' FOSSPost goes even further, running the headline 'Audacity is now a possible spyware, remove it ASAP.' While the team has announced that Audacity will begin collecting telemetry, it's neither overly broad in scope nor aggressive in how it acquires the data-and the majority of the real concerns were addressed two months ago, to the apparent satisfaction of the actual Audacity community. However, the negativity seems to be both massively overblown and quite late. Audacity is free and open source, relatively easy to use, cross platform, and ideally suited for simple 'prosumer' tasks like editing raw audio into finished podcasts. This would be very alarming if true-there aren't any obvious successors or alternatives which meet the same use cases.

Over the fourth of July weekend, several open source news outlets began warning readers that the popular open source audio editing app Audacity is now 'spyware.'