New owners are introducing telemetry in Audacity

[John C.]

________________________________________________________________________
Future versions of the open source cross-platform audio editor will make
use of Telemetry to improve development of the application.

Imagine the following scenario: the ownership of a popular program
changes and one of the first new things that will get added is
Telemetry. Most users would probably assume the worst, that Telemetry is
added for marketing purposes or worse.

In the case of Audacity, that is not the case. There are two main ways
that developers introduce Telemetry into an application: the first makes
it opt-out, so that all users of the application who upgrade to the new
version or install it will have data collected and transferred to the
developer. The second way makes the data collecting opt-in, which means
that users will have to enable Telemetry willingly before data is
collected and transferred.

Audacity plans to use two providers, Google and Yandex initially.
________________________________________________________________________

Full article is here:

https://www.ghacks.net/2021/05/07/audacity-is-introducing-telemetry-but-in-a-good-way/

Kudos to Martin for pointing this out, but I think it's more than just a
little naive to say that "Audacity is introducing Telemetry, but in a
good way."

Be sure and read some of the comments below the article.

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On Sat, 8 May 2021 03:05:03 -0700, "John C." <r9j...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>Be sure and read some of the comments below the article.

Nice one. This should be a really active thread with lots of rants.

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[Shadow]

On Sat, 8 May 2021 03:05:03 -0700, "John C." <r9j...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>________________________________________________________________________
>Future versions of the open source cross-platform audio editor will make
>use of Telemetry to improve development of the application.
>
>Imagine the following scenario: the ownership of a popular program
>changes and one of the first new things that will get added is
>Telemetry. Most users would probably assume the worst, that Telemetry is
>added for marketing purposes or worse.

It's usually "for worse" after enough users have accepted it.
HTH
[]'s

>
>In the case of Audacity, that is not the case. There are two main ways
>that developers introduce Telemetry into an application: the first makes
>it opt-out, so that all users of the application who upgrade to the new
>version or install it will have data collected and transferred to the
>developer. The second way makes the data collecting opt-in, which means
>that users will have to enable Telemetry willingly before data is
>collected and transferred.
>
>Audacity plans to use two providers, Google and Yandex initially.
>________________________________________________________________________
>
>Full article is here:
>
>https://www.ghacks.net/2021/05/07/audacity-is-introducing-telemetry-but-in-a-good-way/
>
>Kudos to Martin for pointing this out, but I think it's more than just a
>little naive to say that "Audacity is introducing Telemetry, but in a
>good way."
>
>Be sure and read some of the comments below the article.
--

Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012

[VanguardLH]

"John C." <r9j...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> ________________________________________________________________________
> Future versions of the open source cross-platform audio editor will make
> use of Telemetry to improve development of the application.
>
> Imagine the following scenario: the ownership of a popular program
> changes and one of the first new things that will get added is
> Telemetry. Most users would probably assume the worst, that Telemetry is
> added for marketing purposes or worse.
>
> In the case of Audacity, that is not the case. There are two main ways
> that developers introduce Telemetry into an application: the first makes
> it opt-out, so that all users of the application who upgrade to the new
> version or install it will have data collected and transferred to the
> developer. The second way makes the data collecting opt-in, which means
> that users will have to enable Telemetry willingly before data is
> collected and transferred.
>
> Audacity plans to use two providers, Google and Yandex initially.
> ________________________________________________________________________
>
> Full article is here:
>
> https://www.ghacks.net/2021/05/07/audacity-is-introducing-telemetry-but-in-a-good-way/
>
> Kudos to Martin for pointing this out, but I think it's more than just a
> little naive to say that "Audacity is introducing Telemetry, but in a
> good way."
>
> Be sure and read some of the comments below the article.

Telemetry has always been opt-out in web browsers. Not a surprise that
some other software does the same. Should be opt-in, but few users
visit a program's settings, so the author would get almost no telemetry
with default installations.

"As far as Telemetry is concerned, it will be opt-in and disabled by
default, only included in the official GitHub releases and not when
developers compile Audacity from source."

How often do you get custom compiles from 3rd party sources for
Audacity? More likely you get the compiled code (release) from the
Github site, or another site hosting the download. Per the above
statement, Audacity will default to opt-in which means the feature is
disabled by default. It will be others that compile the code themselves
after changing it where you need to be leery about telemetry, and what
is collected and to where it gets sent. But then, any OSS program can
be modified to do whatever someone else wants: they change the code,
they compile, they offer it for download, you get THEIR product and not
the actual source.

[p-0''0-h the cat (coder)]

On Sat, 08 May 2021 10:00:19 -0300, Shadow <S...@dow.br> wrote:

> It's usually "for worse" after enough users have accepted it.

But, but, it doesn't matter, you can fork it!

[SpamBlk]

VanguardLH <V...@nguard.LH> wrote in <news:j4w2gxayrs0i$.dlg@v.nguard.lh>:

> Telemetry has always been opt-out in web browsers. Not a surprise that
> some other software does the same. Should be opt-in, but few users
> visit a program's settings, so the author would get almost no telemetry
> with default installations.
>
> "As far as Telemetry is concerned, it will be opt-in and disabled by
> default, only included in the official GitHub releases and not when
> developers compile Audacity from source."

For now.

I haven't updated Audacity for quite some time.

Moreover, I operate my computer in RAM, and Audacity's penchant to
open up many files to contain chunks of audio data is a little
disconcerting. Perhaps Audacity's new management might want to
look into this.

Anyway I use WaveShop for editing or splitting WAV wav files
as it is rather more memory efficient and a much smaller
program as well. I used to use Audacity for smart audio
normalization, but nowdays prefer ffmpeg's excellent (IMO)
dynaudnorm filter.

https://betanews.com/2021/05/08/audacity-gains-telemetry/

In a pull request on Github[1] headed " Basic telemetry for
the Audacity", project contributor Dmitry Vedenko said:

To identify sessions we use a UUID, which is generated and
stored on the client machine.

We use Yandex Metrica to be able to correctly estimate the
daily active users correctly. We have to use the second
service as Google Analytics is known to have some really
tight quotas.

Both services also record the IP the request is coming
from.


[1]: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835


https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/07/audacity_telemetry/

[p-0''0-h the cat (coder)]

On Sun, 09 May 2021 18:27:20 +0200, Yrrah <Yrra...@acf.invalid> wrote:

>"John C." <r9j...@yahoo.com>:

>
>> Future versions of the open source cross-platform audio editor will make
>> use of Telemetry to improve development of the application.

>...

>> Audacity plans to use two providers, Google and Yandex initially.
>

>Nuff said.

>
>> https://www.ghacks.net/2021/05/07/audacity-is-introducing-telemetry-but-in-a-good-way/
>>
>> Kudos to Martin for pointing this out, but I think it's more than just a
>> little naive to say that "Audacity is introducing Telemetry, but in a
>> good way."
>

>Extremely naive imho.
>
>domsson commented May 9, 2021:
>"(...) this is not just about whether or not someone agrees to the
>collection of usage data. This is about a questionable over-take of an
>open-source project, about horrible decisions and timing, horrible
>implementation and horrible communication all bundled up into one huge
>disaster. Even if this pull request will not be merged due to the
>pressure of the community, the trust in Muse Group and the future of
>the Audacity project has already sustained damage that most likely can
>not be repaired.(...)"
>From:
>https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

Too funny. Optional telemetry <shakes head> and even then they seem to
be collecting data on who and how many use what and what error messages
occurred. Someone please help me to understand.