Amid Public Pressure Audacity Says It Will Not Collect Telemetry Data From Users (betanews.com) 79
After its recent announcement about plans to add telemetry collection prompted backlash, popular audio editor Audacity has announced it won't go ahead with the plan to collect its users' data. BetaNews reports: Audacity's new owner, Muse Group, has bowed to pressure from users and privacy advocates, announcing that the planned telemetry collection will no longer be going ahead. The company is blaming "communication mistakes" and public "misunderstanding" for the negative response to its previous data collection announcement.
A simple misunderstanding... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, of course... A simple misunderstanding...
Re:A simple misunderstanding... (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, if you want to improve usability of such a program, anonymous telemetry showing which buttons get pressed, which features get used, ... can be really useful and isn't nefarious at all.
But such things have gotten a terrible reputation (for understandable reasons).
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The person most likely to stab you in the back and steal your money isn't wearing a hoodie, but a business suit.
Re:A simple misunderstanding... (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, if you want to improve usability of such a program, anonymous telemetry showing which buttons get pressed, which features get used, ... can be really useful and isn't nefarious at all.
But such things have gotten a terrible reputation (for understandable reasons).
There's other ways to do it than using Google Analytics, the use of which [betanews.com] is likely why users objected.
Re:A simple misunderstanding... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, using Google and Yandex is totally unacceptable. What were they thinking? If it was sent to their own servers and seen only by Audacity developers, I would probably opt in.
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i suspect they were thinking that they wanted to monetize their investment.
death to the peoples' enemies! NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR! KULAKS TO THE GULAGS!
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i suspect they were thinking that they wanted to monetize their investment.
They have a funny way of showing it. Google/Yandex is the devil. If enough people shun and block them, we can put them in a box
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Yes, comrade, we can smash imperialist capitalism once we unite the world!
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The issue on GitHub does mention that they will switch away from Google Analytics if someone suggests something else suitable.
I don't know much about this, is there any other service they could use that would meet your approval?
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I don't know much about this, is there any other service they could use that would meet your approval?
A third party service will almost always be involved, since reinventing the wheel by implementing your own isn't usually practical.
That said, there's MixPanel [mixpanel.com] and also (perhaps just as questionabe as Google/Yandex) MS' AppCenter [appcenter.ms] (formerly Hockey), and there's probably others (like Apple's own metrics through TestFlight, but obviously only for iOS and(?) macOS apps).
Re:A simple misunderstanding... (Score:5, Interesting)
But doesn't it result in biased data? You only get the data from users who want to share it enough to opt-in or from users who don't care/cannot find a way to opt-out. That may not be an accurate sample of all users.
Software development happened before telemetry was so widespread and, IMO, the software was better (compare old Firefox UI vs new for example or Window XP/7 vs 8/10).
Be active on forums, have a way for users to send suggestions and complaints or something instead of going "well, the users who have not figured out how to opt-out don't use this feature, I guess we can cut it out".
Re:A simple misunderstanding... (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been a lot of suggestions that this is exactly why Firefox keeps getting worse, because telemetry comes only from morons.
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That may not be an accurate sample of all users.
Welcome to the self defeating strategy of the technical-elite. Precisely those people who spend the most time complaining about the reduction of advanced features are the same people who disable the telemetry. End result is the companies in question point to their data: "No one uses this functionality"
Software development happened before telemetry was so widespread and, IMO, the software was better
You sound like an expert. Don't worry, most of us are. This is one of the major issues also facing open source software. Technically solid products for the technically advanced user. We learn it. We use it for
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Windows 7 control panel had the choice between categories (that I never used) and the all-in-one-screen way like Windows XP and earlier.
Simple, logical, menu based options easy to understand without any technical mumbojumbo.
I wonder how many people find that useful, because I mostly see two kinds of users - those who know where to find the settings (in the old style control panel, the new style is harder for them initially) and those who would ask someone (or google) how to do something, in which case how the control panel is arranged does not matter.
Welcome to the self defeating strategy of the technical-elite. Precisely those people who spend the most time complaining about the reduction of advanced features are the same people who disable the telemetry. End result is the companies in question point to their data: "No one uses this functionality"
If it's a known thing that some people do n
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Choice: aka another complex option that makes every computer different. Again whether having choices is better or not depends on who you ask.
and those who would ask someone (or google) how to do something
You're speaking as a techie again. The overwhelming majority of users actually open up the settings and go for a quick browse rather than Googling a technical answer. The difference is obvious. In the past where computers were "complicated" and effectively reserved for those with knowledge there were far less users than now. Don't underestimate the importance of the ig
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Choice: aka another complex option that makes every computer different. Again whether having choices is better or not depends on who you ask.
As long as the defaults are reasonable, I don't think that a lot of people would dislike having the choice to do something else.
The overwhelming majority of users actually open up the settings and go for a quick browse
Really? Because it was my experience that users are usually afraid to break something by messing with the settings, so they ask others instead.
Then again, those are the type of users who say things like "the computer showed some message and now it does not work. I did not read the message".
Then again, maybe my own experience is biased because the slightly more knowledgeable users d
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Perhaps they should their communication dept with...more telementry?
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"What we have here is... failure to communicate."
Less than a year (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Less than a year (Score:5, Informative)
Oh well it's not like the wav file spec has changed in decades. Old versions will continue to work for eternity.
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>"Oh well it's not like the wav file spec has changed in decades. Old versions will continue to work for eternity."
While that is true, and the open source can be forked to another project, software needs to be updated when OTHER things change- the tool kits, the language, the libraries, hardware interfaces, OS API's, etc. All this requires resources to change the code when necessary, which might or might not travel to a fork.
I love Audacity and use it several times a year, for many years. It just works
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To late! your reputation is gone. (Score:1)
Re: To late! your reputation is gone. (Score:2)
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Funny you should mention reputation. Inc has a short story [inc.com] about Warren Buffett relating to one's reputation:
"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that you'll do things differently."
Apparently I've been living his advice for decades.
Yet (Score:2, Informative)
They will collect telemetry, but they will wait until people aren't paying attention
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Re:Yet (Score:4, Insightful)
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>"I don't understand this. As long as the project remains open-source, it's open to scrutiny. When they go closed-sourced, you can continue to use the last open-source version. Most likely it'll get forked and continue. This has happened with many open-source project"
While that is true, software needs to be updated when OTHER things change- the tool kits, the language, the libraries, hardware interfaces, compilers, OS API's, etc. And also when changes cause new bugs and issues to appear. All this requi
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Sometimes you need to demostrate rather than explain so https://www.audacityteam.org/a... [audacityteam.org] and so "Audacity is free software. You may use it for any personal, commercial, institutional or educational purpose, including installing it on as many different computers as you wish. You may also copy, distribute, modify, and/or resell Audacity, under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as published by the Free Software Foundation â" either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
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> telemetry is always invasive and undesirable
Only when some bonehead decides to default to it being OUT OUT instead of the correct OPT IN. it should be OFF by default.
Telemetry has gotten a bad rap because of stupid crap like that. It can be used for good but sadly too many developers don't respect a user's time, space, or privacy.
"Software needs to be updated when..." (Score:2)
Open source has adopted some very bad practices in this regard. People gratuitously break backward compatibility, leading to the snowballing of consequences. People fail to bounds check, leading to a snowballing of consequences. People add "features" nobody actually needs, leading to a snowballing of consequences.
I blame the cult of the cool hack as an end in itself. We need a culture of first asking "is this really worth it?" I suppose
Re:Yet (Score:5, Funny)
They will collect telemetry, but they will wait until people aren't paying attention
The audacity of this company, thinking it's acceptable for them to collect telemetry data of users.
Re: Yet (Score:1)
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They will collect telemetry, but they will wait until people aren't paying attention
It's open-source: the minute the binary does something that's not in the source, it'll be forked and they'll be fast-tracked to irrelevance. And this kerfuffle (sorry, covfefe) virtually ensures each and every subsequent release will be closely scrutinized.
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That would imply someone cared enough to compile from source and compare checksums to the precompiled version. To say open source is trustworthy is a bit of a fallacy, yes you can look into it, but you end up assuming everyone else has, creating the internet equivalent of the bystander effect.
This applies to a lot of things, bias in the news (They're rated highly for neutrality so I don't have to check), voting (ballots are secure so I don't have to keep an eye on the vans or the ones counting them), advert
Not Greed.. no (Score:1)
Not Jumping on the 'telemetry to sell to government' gravy train that is today's surveillance friendly internet.
When all else fails... (Score:5, Insightful)
The company is blaming "communication mistakes" and public "misunderstanding" for the negative response
When all else fails, blame users for "not understanding" what you said; and do not, repeat: do not take any responsibility for your own miscommunication.
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Except that their problem is that the public *DID* understand what they wanted to do.
When all else stagnates... (Score:2)
Make Audacity a better piece of open-source? Surely nothing so audacious as that.
Re:When all else fails... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think most of the vitriol was about using Google and Yandex to do the collecting.
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Considering how often big companies have fucked over their users over the years, this should not be considered an overreaction, but a learned response backed up by years of experience. Someone could literally and sincerely offer the best interest rate for a 10k loan and beat out all the banks in the city by a landslide, and people's first instict would be to immediately go hostile and say "You're trying to trick me!"
We are so used to being fucked over that if someone ISN'T fucking us over we assume they're
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When all else fails, blame users for "not understanding" what you said
To be fair whenever the term telemetry comes up users start frothing at the mouth and kick off knee jerk reactions. So it stands to reason that practically no one actually understands the details here.
User's aren't interested. Now excuse me while I go get the pitchfork there's an angry mob outside and I want to be part of it.
Well crap. (Score:1)
Testing the waters (Score:5, Interesting)
They did not back off due to altruism.
Re:Testing the waters (Score:5, Insightful)
That's sort of how the open-source process works. Someone will submit a change to improve the product (in this case they wanted the telemetry to see how it was being used and went with the market leader), then it gets reviewed and discussed, and if people bring up valid points for why it shouldn't be included (such as privacy concerns of allowing Google access to such data) then the idea doesn't get integrated.
People are acting as if it's some secret nefarious plan to sell all their users' data, but they've been open with the plan and reasoning.
Somebody should fork it (Score:1)
Why was it even thinking of this anyway? Someone with a commitment to free software should just fork it. And, while they're at it, maybe get it to scale on 4k monitors on Linux properly. ;)
Re:Somebody should fork it (Score:5, Interesting)
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Probably not, as ironically that web page is blank until I allow scripts for storage.googleapis.com.
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What do you think this was?
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I don't think anyone polled the users before submitting the PR that added the telemetry...
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The PR included the discussion and solicited feedback. If every feature required "polling the users", no development would get done
Time to put a fork in it. (Score:1)
Was going to be opt-in what's the big deal? (Score:3, Informative)
TFA says that the proposal was to add an opt-in ability to send usage and performance statistics. Plenty of software projects do this.
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Telemetry! data collection... privacy... dude don't fail me. I'm bored and out for blood. I already got my pitchfork out, I don't need your common sense getting me down.
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Because to them, this scenario would inevitably happen:
"*pokes fingers together like an anime girl* Oopsie-woopsie, we made a little fucky-wucky and accidentally got our bytes mixed up and collected telemetry from everyone. You can disable it in your settings and the next update will correct this error [imgur.com]."
public "misunderstanding" (Score:2)
Correction (Score:1)
Re: "then that's too tracks many to manage"
Should be: "then that's too many tracks to manage"
Modnays.
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The way I'd do this, which is ugly and hacky but Audacity's limitations and general air of janky bullshit sort of make for lots of ugly / hacky solutions, is to add a second track, copy-paste the clip onto the new track (if you select > copy > add new track > paste, in that precise order, it'll default to being in the exact same position on the timeline as the first clip - a small mercy, but one a humble Audacity peon appreciates), adjust it on the new track as needed, go back to the first track, s
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For that sort of thing you need a proper DAW - try Reaper (https://www.reaper.fm)
Not free but *really* affordable professional quality software and, in my humble opinion, the best DAW out there.
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Hmm, okay I'll consider it.
I've been kicking around the idea of making my own sound editor, and perhaps open-sourcing it. I'd like to get back into GUI work after web crap for so long.
It would have both track-ness and snippet-ness in that if you place a snippet into a given track, it inherits parameters that are blank to avoid reinventing settings. I'll call the track a "band" here, and multiple parallel snippets can be put into any band. One can merge all snippets of a given tracks(s) into one big snippet
HOSTS (Score:2)
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iptables... (Score:2)
Welcome to the post-trust world. As atheists distrust religion and libertarians distrust government, we need to distrust everything and everyone. It's not so bad. You get used to it.
How dare they!? (Score:2)
The audacity.
My experience with Audacity devs (Score:2)
When you use the timestamps at the bottom to define a selection, the timestamps lock mouse focus, so if you then try to use the mousewheel to zoom in/out or scroll left/right, it instead increments/decrements the timestamp. This is such a pain in the ass when trying to select a precise chunk of audio and then move around in the project view to get visual context or to zoom in for super-fine-tune manual adjustment.
The only way to get your mouse focus back without losing your selection is to click a precise,
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I should have figured you'd be on /. as well, hah!
Let me say clearly here that I did, and do, really appreciate that you got back to me, especially as quickly as you did (less than 12 hours, for all those in the audience).
What frustrated me, though, is that you seemed to have read my email in the wrong light.
While I also really do honestly appreciate the time you took to provide the CTRL-SHIFT-F6 tip, my email wasn't intended as a request for support - you can CTRL-F the 2020/9/06 email for "how can I" or e
MuseScore (Score:2)
MuseScore does optionally send telemetry. The thing with open source is that you can inspect the source for what telemetry they send, provided you trust that the binary is built from the publicly available source. Personally if it helps them make a better product, and the telemetry is stuff that helps them do this, rather than being spyware, I'm happy to send it to them, along with crash dumps. I imagine they thought they could do similar here, and had a bit of a shock. I think the simple thing should be th