Finally the day has come. MuseGroup , currently responsible for the development of Audacity, has released a new version of the audio editing program, 3.0.3. And, with it, telemetry has arrived. Despite being a 100% offline program, starting today, the program will begin to collect data from users who use this software and send it to the company’s servers. Luckily, for now, this telemetry can be disabled.
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 comes with many improvements and news in addition to this dreaded telemetry. For example, the first thing we will find is that, from now on, the program is installed as 64-bit software. Thanks to this, the tasks of processing songs and applying 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 the 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. A new view menu is also included to see the name of the sound clip, a new binary for Linux (AppImage) is included, and several bugs and errors in the program are fixed.
But, regardless of these developments, what is most worrying is telemetry. Luckily, that has an easy solution.
Telemetry can be disabled
Starting with 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 of new updates . We can deactivate this automatic check to keep us private from the preferences menu (Control + P) , within 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.
Error reporting 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.
Also, we recommend blocking 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.
