Audacity wants your data.

Why has Pull Request #835 raised the ire of so many free software advocates? Because Audacity had the... errr... well... audacity to introduce opt-in telemetry collection into the application.

Many-a-FOSS developer finds even the mere suggestion of telemetry collection to be an affront to the very concept of software freedom. I, however, have always believed that it's not only valid but--if done ethically--could be a valuable resource for the community at large.

Let's talk about the good, the bad, and the weird about Audacity's decision and how we as observers could help them make better decisions.

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[Tantacrul]

I hope you don't mind me intruding on your comments space. I'd like to draw people's attention to our update on this issue:

[SimGunther]

Opt-in: fine so long as it doesn't override my choice magically

[vagabondarcade]

The concern about this is less that telemetry is being added, and more that Google Analytics and Yandex are being used to aggregate data. Those platforms are both weapons grade privacy molesters. The community would be less upset if they were using an open source solution.

[VanishingTacos]

The door handle turning at 7:24 freaked me out lmao

[WebFreak]

7:55 I believe windows users are trained to click any unchecked checkboxes and then clicking continue :p

[tommy]

And now there is a killer in the room! 😬🔪

[LordSoulSicarious]

As far as I'm concerned, the only real way to do telemetry ethically is the way it used to be done back around the turn of the millenium. When a program freezes or crashes, or when users initiate a troubleshooting tool for whatever reason, users can opt in to send a one-off collection of recent usage data to the developers/maintainers. Bonus points for explicitly stating what data is being sent, what it may be used for, and who is allowed to access it. No continuous monitoring, no obfuscation.

[praecorloth]

The ghost opening your door was creepy.

Anyway, back to content. I actually wish more FOSS applications would collect basic analytics.

[alexf]

oh I would love to have open analytics tools. A FOSS alternative, that is ethical and so complete many companies would prefer them.

[tvvoty]

It's not between having a check box and two buttons one of which is highlighted, it's should be two buttons and NON of them should be highlighted. Just installed PyCharm and it has better opt-ins screen. It makes the thing with google look all the more suspicious.

[ajhalili]

Hey Gardiner, in your opinion, why adding telemetry in apps like Audacity sounds like bad for privacy because people assumes they track your app's usage + mine data about you like Google and Facebook does?

[bryanpaget]

Great video Gardiner, usage data can be very helpful to improve the quality of a product.

[michaelm]

The consent screen is absolutely missing that your 'anonymous' data, including your IP address, is sent to Google. Everything else Audacity devs did is alright, but this I have a problem with.

[neandertalac]

I'm still on 2.4 version. And thanks to LTS Ubuntu Mate, I don't have this problem

[Ivan-efjy]

This is what I think about what's shown on 4:46, the excuses from the developers:
1. False, you have forums and bug tracking system for that.
2. Yep, so what. If you don't want to maintain the project, let others do it.
3. Make a poll. Ask your user base. Create a fork.
4. "Help the users one by one?" wtf... do whatever you want, it's free software after all. Somebody will help them anyway. I would chose fixing it or creating a patch.
Those are just excuses for a first step...

[luperteverett]

To be honest, I can understand and fully support this discontent. If you get founded to gather several projects under one umbrella, and the very first thing you do after acquiring Audacity is to add telemetry to it, which I'd like to point out that it was doing just fine without it for years, then obviously some eyebrows have to be risen about it. Not to mention that, just like you mentioned, all this detailing happened after the outrage, so take of it as what you will.

And personally I am against all of that telemetry stuff, my reasoning is as follows:
- Opt-out ones have the extremely high chance of being pretty invasive, later if not immediately now, judging by the prime examples of it from Microsoft's own products.
- Opt-in ones would work in theory, but in practice, there is a huge possibility that majority of the people would choose not to enable it in the first place, so that what statistics you'd get from it would be non-representative of the actual usage from your users, making this pointless.
- You could do just better with _actually trusting the opinions of your users in the first place_, as hey, bug reporting and such have worked all those years.

[jaredgoodman]

Are there comparable self-hosted google analytics alternatives?

[PizzaLovingNerd]

Another good album in the background haha

what happened to greyed out "continue" that unlocks on consumer picking 1 of 2 checkboxes? you force ppl to read, at least enough to choose "i do/n't consent" and there's no accidental "sheet i clicked the blue button but that's the consent not the refusal"
and yes, taking the easy road might be realistic but since when is the best path the easiest? how is it wrong to ask for better? pitchforks might be over the top of course.

While I agree with most of what you said, here's my 2 cents:
1) For that dialog to be considered "opt-in", it should either default to "Don't send" (and make it blue) or not have any default at all, make both buttons grey and force the user to either click one of them. As it is done, it's borderline an "opt-out". Which is perfectly fine and I really like how this dialog works. And I understand and agree with making this dialog this way.
2) What happens if we close the dialog? Will opt-in or out?
3) I don't think there's an issue of trust with the company here (at least from me). It's open source. As long as there are external contributors to the company that could raise any issues later, this is perfectly fine.
4) Sending the data to Google Analytics is a non-issue to me. Sure, open source solution hosted on-site would be best, but I don't see Google misusing or leaking this data. And the data is already anonymous, so what gives? We should concentrate on making the data as anonymous as possible instead of blaming providers.