MuseGroup acquired the rights to Audacity last May. Soon after, the company began announcing the first changes to the program’s usage policies. And the first of these changes was, unfortunately, the introduction of a telemetry system. With it, the company wants to enable automatic updates and obtain usage and error reports in order to continue with the development of the program as well as possible. However, the company collects much more data than it should, such as IP addresses and even complete memory dumps from our system. And all this data can be transferred to third parties (such as the authorities). If we add to that the fact that MuseGroup operates in Russia and the United States, where data protection policies are conspicuous by their absence, the party is guaranteed.
Audacity 3.0.3: telemetry arrived with other changes
The new Audacity 3.0.3 It comes with many improvements and news in addition to this dreaded telemetry. For example, the first thing that we will find is that, from now on, the program is installed as a software of 64 bit. Thanks to this, the tasks of processing the songs and applying the effects will run faster. Of course, the 32-bit plugins will stop working, and some users will have to install the 64-bit FFmpeg libraries.
Another relevant change is that spectrograms now have a new color palette, although users who prefer the classic configuration will be able to have it without problems from the configuration. Also included is a new view menu to see the name of the sound clip, a new binary for Linux (AppImage) and fixes various bugs and errors in the program.
But regardless of these developments, what is most worrying is telemetry. Luckily, that has an easy solution.
Telemetry can be disabled
As of the new version 3.0.3, Audacity will begin to collect our data and share it with MuseGroup every time we use it in order to notify us if there are new updates. This automatic check can be deactivated to keep us private from the preferences menu (Control + P), in the “Application” section. It will be enough to deactivate this box so that the program no longer checks for new versions of the program and, therefore, we can use it privately.
The bug report It is another of the functions that collects and sends our data. This report cannot be deactivated, but its submission is optional, so if we are simply vigilant and refuse to share the data with MuseGroup when the program fails, we will be safe.
In addition, we recommend block all Audacity connections on the firewall. At the end of the day, it is a 100% offline program, so we are not going to lose any functionality or features.
