10 ms·

Audacity: Actions we propose to take on PR 835

190 points by jraph 5y ago

tgv 5y ago
Looks like they're handling this (use of google analytics, yandex) properly. Promising.
peteretep 5y ago
> We assumed that making it opt-in would allay privacy concerns That seems like a reasonable assumption to me?
- burundi_coffee 5y ago
  That's not primarily what it was about. "...the convenience of using Yandex and Google is at odds with the public perception of trustworthiness..."
- treszkai 5y ago
  > We assumed that making it opt-in would allay privacy concerns but since this isn't the case, we are dropping it. Especially after dropping Google & Yandex, I guess they could've stood up for their telemetry needs, and flat-out say that "if you have privacy concerns about our anonymous opt-in telemetry, you can just use the default settings."
- randallsquared 5y ago
  Once the feature and toggle exist, reversing the default is a much lower barrier than adding the feature. Keeping it expensive helps reassure users that they'd notice the change.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    Absolutely agreed. A program without telemetry being possible at all is not one that I need to worry about enabling it behind my back. Imagine if /bin/bash had optional telemetry. Suddenly I'd need a way to ensure that telemetry is never enabled. In order to make sure that no confidential data are leaked, I'd need to have that setting always be visible, perhaps by adding it to my $PS1. I'd need to make a mental habit of checking that setting before executing any command that contains confidential data. All that additional overhead as a result of telemetry being an option at all. There are a couple different stages on the sliding scale of telemetry, which have huge effects in the amount of privacy being sacrificed on the part of the user. However, the biggest technical hurdle is in that very first step, from "No telemetry is possible" to "telemetry is possible". Every single step after that is small and incremental, easily enabled with minimal effort. * No telemetry is possible. * Telemetry is possible, but requires searching in a menu to enable. * Telemetry is possible, and has a single opt-in popup, path of least resistance is to disable telemetry. (e.g. An unchecked box that enables telemetry, and a "Continue" button. The easiest path is to ignore the box and just click continue.) * Telemetry is possible, and has a single yes/no popup, both accept/decline are equally easy to select. * Telemetry is possible, and has a single opt-out popup, path of lease resistance is to enable telemetry. (e.g. Same as the opt-in popup, but with the box defaulting to being checked.) This is the level that starts to raise red flags for me, and to make me feel uncomfortable with it. * Telemetry is possible, and has several nag screens. These may re-occur each time you start the software, or re-occur sporadically. These may have the euphemistic option "Not Now", a newspeak phrase that prevents me from saying "No" entirely. * Telemetry is mandatory, but can be blocked at the router level. Any software here and above is spyware, and should be treated as such. * Telemetry is mandatory, and software refuses to run without a server connection.
    - hansvm 5y ago
      > Imagine if /bin/bash had optional telemetry. That immediately brought PowerShell to mind -- it boggles the mind how much opt-out telemetry Microsoft has in their core offerings.
      - MereInterest 5y ago
        Holy wat? I had to look it up to make sure you weren't joking, but yes, PowerShell has telemetry [0]. I hadn't ever looked into it when developing on Windows because it hadn't even crossed my mind that that would be something that was done. I think I'd insert "Silently enables telemetry without telling you and with no indication that telemetry can be disabled" just below the mandatory telemetry stage, and would extend the "spyware" description to include it. [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_telemetry?view=powershell-7.1 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...
        hansvm 5y ago
        Not just PowerShell by the way. Most of their CLI offerings (compilers, shells, ...) that I've used have opt-out telemetry. > Silently enables telemetry Iirc most of them tell you about that the first time you use them, or they did back when I still used Windows.
  - some1else 5y ago
    The default was opt-in (telemetry off).
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  It is a reasonable assumption. They just totally flubbed the original incident. Someone just dropped a PR saying they're merging in telemetry without any issue discussion, or forum post, or anything, and all the initial review discussion on it was able how they should vendor their dependencies - no discussion about telemetry.
- svrtknst 5y ago
  Both yes and no imo. I strongly believe that they have good intentions and that the reception has been a bit in bad faith. I think it's a reasonable assumption to make, but as a user I'd want insight and granular choices, rather than just "allow telemetry? y/N"
- yakubin 5y ago
  If it's opt-in and there are privacy concerns about where this data goes to after you opt into it, then probably fewer people will choose to opt in. The option outlined in the submission may attract more people to opt in, thus making the data more conclusive and valuable.
- atoav 5y ago
  If I where in their shoes, these would the multiple dimensions I'd think about when taking that decision: - legal (living in Germany I am legally only allowed to share personal data from my users with entities with whom I have a data processing contract ("Datenverarbeitungsvertrag") that specifies how they treat said data) - practical (using a provider which people trust, will make more people switch on telemetry. People who use your software usually trust you – so it makes sense to collect telemetry yourself) - personal (I want to know what I am running where, feels better to me) - political (no need to feed big monopolists yet another shovel of user data. After all I make open source software because I want the world to become a better place) - ethical (is it ethical to use a provider which could do god knows what with your users data? Users trust you, which means you have to choose providers which you can trust) - symbolical (whom does a open source project trust with their users data? What does this in itself communicate?) That being said this is opt-in, which leaves the decision about many of these things to the users. However to me this episode revealed something about their thinking on that specific issue – or rather the lack of it. I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow if they managed to express a good reason why they want to rely specifically on those services, why they trust them with their user data etc. What raised my eyebrows is, that they didn't think about that at all, which means the privacy of their users isn't valued as high as I would have assumed prior. Their reaction gives some hope they learn from this.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  The PR had the opt-in choice button set as default, which is not very GDPR compatible.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  It definitely is but unfortunately the original PR didn't say that it was opt-in, only that it was "optional" which usually means opt-out. Obviously people on Reddit and HN assumed the worst and by then it was too late to get the truth out. Bit of a shame; I feel like telemetry probably would have been quite useful to them (e.g. for optimising which things are in the toolbar). Though, on the other hand I think Audacity's usability problems are obvious enough that they easily have a decade of work before they get to the point where they run out of things to improve.
- sneak 5y ago
  Yeah, opt-in is totally fine. I'm straight up militant about opt-out spyware bullshit in apps, but opt-in should be acceptable to everyone.
noisy_boy 5y ago
I recently wanted to split a long mp3 file into individual tracks. I used Audacity for it. As someone with zero experience in sound editing, I expected it to be more complicated than it turned out to be. We need to have such open source applications available to us without fear of telemetry sharing with ad companies. Glad to see the decision.
- Ninn 5y ago
  Based on your stance it seems that you have not seen the intentions declared in the original PR, including opt-in approaches and the use of data solely for development and UX improvements?
  - noisy_boy 5y ago
    I just don't want to take the chance about telemetry data being used for monetization, now or in future. Also, the original PR's setup meant that even if I wanted to share telemetry, there was no way for me to share that without it going to Google/Yandex. And I definitely don't trust them.
    - eterevsky 5y ago
      So, first of all, as someone who works for Google, I don't think you should be worried about it. Using personal data is currently pretty strictly regulated. Using 3rd party analytics data in such a way would likely be illegal (IANAL and I'm not writing this comment on behalf of Google). And even in the worst case, supposing that Google and Yandex are evil, what's your exact concern? That you presses on Play and Record buttons will be used to target ads?
      - svrtknst 5y ago
        Imo the last part is a bit too dismissive. It's not too hard to imagine how telemetry from software can be used for ad targeting, or for more nefarious purposes, since the telemetry would have access to track info, including metadata. If we're imagining worst-case scenarios, my first thought is "use track info to discover unlicensed music usage". Or for ads.
OJFord 5y ago
I often think, especially if you have 'technical' users, better than telemetry is just making it easy to tell you things. I frequently want to be able to just quickly say 'gah, that was annoying, I clicked that instead of that because I thought it would do that, not seeing this covered by those' or whatever, just vent a little bit, and vaguely hope it might be improved. Not a support chat, happy to have fa follow-up email if more information needed and it's actually being worked on I suppose, but generally just a quick easy fire and forget. Like telemetry, but where the user provides all the content; not a glorified yes/no to content you've guessed ahead of time.
- dataduck 5y ago
  Subnautica had this in early access: a "feedback" function where you chose either a smiley or sad face, filled in a free text field, and one click sent it to the devs. From what I hear this worked pretty well.
  - tux3 5y ago
    Yup. And Visual Studio has Send a Smile/Frown, firefox had something similar plus a "Report site issue" button that takes you to a simple web form. Those things are not super hard to put in place, and seems like a great way to get feedback that people wouldn't travel all the way to the Github issue tracker for =)
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      Visula studio is also teeming with telemetry, though.
- synthmeat 5y ago
  Yup, this has been best advice I've listened last year, and subsequently built on-site community chatbox. It's been amazing source of QA, feature ideas, discovering who are the real people using the service... We even hired from it. My only reservation was that it won't scale but even for userbase of 100s of thousands registered and millions of uniques a month (in the parlance of dumb telemetry), it has! I love it. To anticipate "why not just discord/telegram/whatever channel/server" - doesn't work as well, there's certain immediacy of it being purpose-built and being right there on site, that's apparently very valuable.
LegitShady 5y ago
There is some fishy stuff going on with audacity and "muse" that nobody involved seems to be able to just say out loud simply. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/880 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/880 Personally I would rather use closed source reaper or an audicity fork than deal with whatever is going on with audacity. Everyone involved seems to have been sworn to secrecy which generally tells me it's not in my best interest to get involved and pit myself in a position where this conspiracy has any influence over me.
- jraph 5y ago
  Can you point out the problems shown by this discussion? Because I can't. The concerns are legitimate but let's give Muse some time to answer properly. I haven't seen anything shady… other than the initial telemetry thing that has been widely fixed. The community has been listened, I see this as an actually very positive thing for Muse. I'm very happy to see private companies take care of open source projects (if they do it properly, obviously)
  - Jiejeing 5y ago
    The history of musescore is not really the brightest, which may explain why people do not trust them much ([0] and discussion). Yes, they shelved telemetry and listened to the community, which is good, but they still proposed an intrusive change without discussion and only turned back because the outrage was big enough. [0] https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issue-562094186 https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issu...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    >he concerns are legitimate but let's give Muse some time to answer properly. It's 6 days old, and they have some responses in the discussion but nothing that clarifies what was going on. It appears to be heavily NDA'd. Musescore has done some interesting things https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5 https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5
igorkraw 5y ago
Well, that's nice to see. Let's hope both Muse and the community can have a productive exchange now that a sign of good faith (dropping Google Yandex, changing the source default to be telemetry free, making much clearer what is connected and why) has been offered.
andybak 5y ago
Anyone here want to speak up for opt-out telemetry to help understand product usage patterns? Surely "opt-in" destroys any validity the data would have (self selected groups are usually a poor proxy for typical users) even aside from the massive drop-off in participation.
- maweki 5y ago
  Considering the people who would give out their zip-code in the supermarket at checkout, I would hazard the guess that the less technical crowd would opt in and that their feedback or telemetry on what makes a simple UI is more valuable.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    But in the case of a checkout where you give info letting them track your purchases, you get discounts in return. Audacity isn't offering anything in return for opting in to telemetry.
    - svrtknst 5y ago
      What you're getting in return is improved UX and performance, albeit it is a more abstract and collective gain than discounts. You also get (unless you are a contributor, I guess) a very capable and transparent music editing software for free.
    - maweki 5y ago
      In Germany I have never been offered a discount in that manner. Coupons are the only way to do this here.
      - majewsky 5y ago
        I'm also German. Once, when I was asked for my zip code at checkout, I asked what they use it for. The cashier said it's being used to decide where to distribute physical advertisements (those store-branded magazines that land in your mailbox every week which list all the items that are on sale next week). I can't know how much truth there is to it, so take it with a grain of salt.
contingencies 5y ago
Literally just used it (still open) to to create an audio performance for my kid's schoolwork. I use it once a year on average, all platforms, for a decade or more. It's awesome, though the whole import/export is not save/load thing seems superfluous. While this makes sense to programmers, for normal user UX I would recommend removing that and just normalize to save/save-as with warnings if data is being lost. Telemetry or advertising would make me use alternatives.
- nemetroid 5y ago
  In high school, one of my teachers flubbed the recordings of an oral exam by having multiple student recordings in a single Audacity session and only saving a version with all tracks overlaid on each other. If anything, I think save/export need to be made more distinct.
- pdpi 5y ago
  Import/export has its own distinct meaning that is unrelated to save. It’s common to almost every content creation tool that has a distinction between an editing format (eg .psd, .reason, .fcpx) and a publishing format (.jpeg, .mp3, .mp4)
- frabbit 5y ago
  Sounds like some sort of plagiarism if you are doing your kids schoolwork. Let them do it themselves.
andensande 5y ago
Not related as such, but worth pointing out. The author of this discussion - and the project manager of Audacity - is Tantacrul, who is, in my opinion, one of the best music youtubers around. His video[0] on corporate music was fantastic, and his video on Shostakovich[1] made me totally reconsider his music. Plus, he's funny! So there's that. Highly recommend! [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCxzMYVvHBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCxzMYVvHBg
- jraph 5y ago
  His reviews of the various scorewriters (Sibelius, Musescore, Dorico) are also fantastic, even if you are not into music. His review of Musescore lead him to become the project manager of Musescore, and probably of Audacity as a consequence. His video Stock Music & Reality TV - How to Misrepresent the World [1] is also really good. [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I
williesleg 5y ago
HA HA assholes got caught!
marsven_422 5y ago
Time to fork!
efficax 5y ago
The hysteria about this is absurd. To make product decisions you need to measure actual usage patterns. To do that you need telemetry.
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  No, you don't. You could talk to people, instead.
  - tester756 5y ago
    then you'll have opinion of vocal minority
    - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
      Yes. Hopefully developers and power users, if they're chosen correctly and given the proper incentives (like having their ideas implemented).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - efficax 5y ago
    Surveys and user interviews are also useful, but nothing beats having the data. And usually we use the telemetry data for the app to craft the surveys and interviews. Did you stick a cool feature on a dialog but nobody ever uses it? Telemetry tells us that's something to look into. The thing is that this is very easy to do with web apps, since you get a ton of telemetry for free through API requests. A desktop app is s black box without telemetry. Just release and pray
    - atatatat 5y ago
      A 10-30 min walkthrough+interview of how 5 users use the software will elicit by who and why the dialog isn't being used.
  - 5y ago
kenniskrag 5y ago
"log a non-reversible hash of the IP address to improve the accuracy of the daily statistics." 2**32 IP addresses seems not to be hard to reverse. Am I wrong?
- simias 5y ago
  For sure, unless they use a very computationally expensive hash. Beyond that I'm not sure why they'd get from that, given that non-static IP addresses are very common on the internet and NATed networks even more so.
  - kenniskrag 5y ago
    IP are considered PII and are regulated. So the easiest way is to avoid PII.
- layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
  If you XOR the four octets into a single byte then it’s definitely irreversible :^) (and also pretty useless for telemetry purposes)
- je42 5y ago
  they could also just generate an "installation" id ? this also works more accurately when the computer switches ip addresses.
  - kenniskrag 5y ago
    > works more accurately That's what they want to avoid. An advantage is, that you can ask the user for the id an check the logs for debugging.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    You could generate an 128-bit installation ID and then send [date, hash(id, date)]. Now when you're debugging with a user you can ask for their ID and see which traffic is theirs.
cardanome 5y ago
There is no good reason to put any form of telemetry in a non commercial open source project, ever. It is just user hostile behavior. Yes, even if it is opt out. Good to see it got pushed back. Let's see for how long. Yes, people will say it "helps make the product better" but open source software, especially the GPL flavor, is for serving the user first and foremost, not making the developers job easier and I strongly doubt it really helps with the later. People these days are just horribly addicted to data gathering and believe quantitative methods for analyzing problems are the only right way. Probably for need to justify their job. Every good open source project is getting more than enough good qualitative feedback from the community that you should focus on. Improve the tool for the people that actually use it and are part of the community and not for some potential new users you hope to generate.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > There is no good reason to put any form of telemetry in a non commercial open source project, ever. That's simply not true, and there are absolutely reasons to put telemetry in projects, including non-commercial open-source projects e.g. tracing performance issues, tracing crashes and other bugs, collecting stats on feature usage (to know what to focus on or what to surface better) or workflows (to know what to improve support for, or what to better document if there are better ways to do things in the project). Getting useful feedback directly from users is difficult, and doubly so when you have no activity traces to go with it. The average Audacity user is never going to capture ETW traces when they have issues, and odds are they'll complain on audio tools forums rather than your own. I'm absolutely sensitive to the argument that telemetry is commonly misused and offline software adding telemetry is dodgy and icky, but pretending telemetry is necessarily useless and bad is just fals. > Every good open source project is getting more than enough good qualitative feedback from the community that you should focus on. 1. they really dont 2. especially for a project aimed mainly at non-dev users (which is what Audacity is), it's very unlikely that the feedback you get is relevant to the majority of your userbase
  - cardanome 5y ago
    We disagree about the goals non-commercial open-source projects should have. I am focusing on serving the (established) users, you on things that might help the developers. I does not matter to me how much telemetry might help development at all. Even if all those things you listed were substantially helping improve development, nope I don't care. Software should serve the user and only the user. As a user I don't have any benefit from the use of telemetry. Sure maybe it might help fix issues in futures version for me but again it does not benefit me as a user of the current version of the software. I am well aware of the benefits of telemetry. If you develop commercial software it is absolutely critical to gather as much data as possible. But again the goal of open source non commercial projects should not be success at all cost. But to argue about the benefits of telemetry for arguments sake, nope raw data is not really that useful, turning it into actionable insights is still a job on its own. Software has been developed without telemetry for decades. There is lot's of way. From getting testers to actual user surveys and so on.
astatine 5y ago
>the convenience of using Yandex and Google is at odds with the public perception of trustworthiness What's the likelihood that this will percolate to non-technical services? If more services think like this, maybe there is hope.
Kiro 5y ago
OT but am I the only one always opting in on telemetry prompts? I want the developers to get as much info possible to improve the app and fix issues.
- NazakiAid 5y ago
  I think more people would if the telemetry was not using Google and Yandex to get the analytics and instead used their own servers and API that no third-parties have access to. Also if there had been more discussion in the first place before implementing this opt-in telemetry.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Yes - my problem with telemetry is never to hide from the app's developer, it's to hide from scum like Google and Facebook, or even "innocent" paid analytics providers like Mixpanel because while those don't profit off my data, they still concentrate it into a single place which would be a problem if leaked or misused.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      s/if/when/ By new management, broke developers, advertisers, data brokers, criminals in government, etc.
  - Kiro 5y ago
    Can't argue with you there. I actually didn't know apps used Google for that. I always just presumed it went to their own servers.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Fantastic, that's your choice. Does this shed light on the subject?
lmeyerov 5y ago
Super non-obvious to a lot of people despite good intentions, so good on Audacity for following up. We were surprised w something similar in Caddy 1: managed sw can monitor, self-hosted shouldn't unless manually added with real friction and alarm bells, vs default on, click through, etc. Otherwise, it's a time bomb that will burn your brand for a long time. Messing up trust issues like violating privacy isn't just about the immediate incident, but the ones you already missed and the ones in the future. Telemetry is a recurring footgun here.
pabs3 5y ago
The only well-done telemetry I have seen in open source is what 0ad does. Everything is fully opt-in and very transparent.
ergot_vacation 5y ago
So we've gone from "Spy on the users in an open-ended way that can grow ever larger" to "If it crashes, you can push a button to send us a report" and an automatic update check (not automatic download!). Both of which can be turned off. That seems reasonable. That said, this has vaporized any trust I had in in Muse group, and it's not coming back any time soon. When big companies "acquire" high quality software or sites, the result is almost always either a. Destruction of the property in an attempt to monetize or b. They mostly forget about it and it gradually rusts away from neglect. Here's hoping Audacity is somehow an exception.
- rozab 5y ago
  It was opt in. There's barely any difference, except crash reports have far more personally identifiable data like hardware configuration.
  - 3836293648 5y ago
    That means nothing. The issue is having it at all. Changing it from opt in to opt out is a tiny change that can sneak past people checking
garaetjjte 5y ago
>These decisions took time to arrive at because - despite my role as the lead on the project - calls on this specific issue are not mine to make. That's just sounds like huge red flag to me.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Only real suspect line in the entire OP, and retroactively justifies the angry user response. Whatever arguments one can make for developers and designers to use telemetry to improve the software are irrelevant. Instead, the owners were making a business decision to add telemetry, not the project lead, and that's the beginning of an attack on the users.

190 points by jraph 5y ago

tgv 5y ago

Looks like they're handling this (use of google analytics, yandex) properly. Promising.

peteretep 5y ago

> We assumed that making it opt-in would allay privacy concerns That seems like a reasonable assumption to me?

burundi_coffee 5y ago
That's not primarily what it was about. "...the convenience of using Yandex and Google is at odds with the public perception of trustworthiness..."
treszkai 5y ago
> We assumed that making it opt-in would allay privacy concerns but since this isn't the case, we are dropping it. Especially after dropping Google & Yandex, I guess they could've stood up for their telemetry needs, and flat-out say that "if you have privacy concerns about our anonymous opt-in telemetry, you can just use the default settings."
randallsquared 5y ago
Once the feature and toggle exist, reversing the default is a much lower barrier than adding the feature. Keeping it expensive helps reassure users that they'd notice the change.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Absolutely agreed. A program without telemetry being possible at all is not one that I need to worry about enabling it behind my back. Imagine if /bin/bash had optional telemetry. Suddenly I'd need a way to ensure that telemetry is never enabled. In order to make sure that no confidential data are leaked, I'd need to have that setting always be visible, perhaps by adding it to my $PS1. I'd need to make a mental habit of checking that setting before executing any command that contains confidential data. All that additional overhead as a result of telemetry being an option at all. There are a couple different stages on the sliding scale of telemetry, which have huge effects in the amount of privacy being sacrificed on the part of the user. However, the biggest technical hurdle is in that very first step, from "No telemetry is possible" to "telemetry is possible". Every single step after that is small and incremental, easily enabled with minimal effort. * No telemetry is possible. * Telemetry is possible, but requires searching in a menu to enable. * Telemetry is possible, and has a single opt-in popup, path of least resistance is to disable telemetry. (e.g. An unchecked box that enables telemetry, and a "Continue" button. The easiest path is to ignore the box and just click continue.) * Telemetry is possible, and has a single yes/no popup, both accept/decline are equally easy to select. * Telemetry is possible, and has a single opt-out popup, path of lease resistance is to enable telemetry. (e.g. Same as the opt-in popup, but with the box defaulting to being checked.) This is the level that starts to raise red flags for me, and to make me feel uncomfortable with it. * Telemetry is possible, and has several nag screens. These may re-occur each time you start the software, or re-occur sporadically. These may have the euphemistic option "Not Now", a newspeak phrase that prevents me from saying "No" entirely. * Telemetry is mandatory, but can be blocked at the router level. Any software here and above is spyware, and should be treated as such. * Telemetry is mandatory, and software refuses to run without a server connection.
  - hansvm 5y ago
    > Imagine if /bin/bash had optional telemetry. That immediately brought PowerShell to mind -- it boggles the mind how much opt-out telemetry Microsoft has in their core offerings.
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      Holy wat? I had to look it up to make sure you weren't joking, but yes, PowerShell has telemetry [0]. I hadn't ever looked into it when developing on Windows because it hadn't even crossed my mind that that would be something that was done. I think I'd insert "Silently enables telemetry without telling you and with no indication that telemetry can be disabled" just below the mandatory telemetry stage, and would extend the "spyware" description to include it. [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_telemetry?view=powershell-7.1 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...
      - hansvm 5y ago
        Not just PowerShell by the way. Most of their CLI offerings (compilers, shells, ...) that I've used have opt-out telemetry. > Silently enables telemetry Iirc most of them tell you about that the first time you use them, or they did back when I still used Windows.
- some1else 5y ago
  The default was opt-in (telemetry off).
icegreentea2 5y ago
It is a reasonable assumption. They just totally flubbed the original incident. Someone just dropped a PR saying they're merging in telemetry without any issue discussion, or forum post, or anything, and all the initial review discussion on it was able how they should vendor their dependencies - no discussion about telemetry.
svrtknst 5y ago
Both yes and no imo. I strongly believe that they have good intentions and that the reception has been a bit in bad faith. I think it's a reasonable assumption to make, but as a user I'd want insight and granular choices, rather than just "allow telemetry? y/N"
yakubin 5y ago
If it's opt-in and there are privacy concerns about where this data goes to after you opt into it, then probably fewer people will choose to opt in. The option outlined in the submission may attract more people to opt in, thus making the data more conclusive and valuable.
atoav 5y ago
If I where in their shoes, these would the multiple dimensions I'd think about when taking that decision: - legal (living in Germany I am legally only allowed to share personal data from my users with entities with whom I have a data processing contract ("Datenverarbeitungsvertrag") that specifies how they treat said data) - practical (using a provider which people trust, will make more people switch on telemetry. People who use your software usually trust you – so it makes sense to collect telemetry yourself) - personal (I want to know what I am running where, feels better to me) - political (no need to feed big monopolists yet another shovel of user data. After all I make open source software because I want the world to become a better place) - ethical (is it ethical to use a provider which could do god knows what with your users data? Users trust you, which means you have to choose providers which you can trust) - symbolical (whom does a open source project trust with their users data? What does this in itself communicate?) That being said this is opt-in, which leaves the decision about many of these things to the users. However to me this episode revealed something about their thinking on that specific issue – or rather the lack of it. I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow if they managed to express a good reason why they want to rely specifically on those services, why they trust them with their user data etc. What raised my eyebrows is, that they didn't think about that at all, which means the privacy of their users isn't valued as high as I would have assumed prior. Their reaction gives some hope they learn from this.
speedgoose 5y ago
The PR had the opt-in choice button set as default, which is not very GDPR compatible.
IshKebab 5y ago
It definitely is but unfortunately the original PR didn't say that it was opt-in, only that it was "optional" which usually means opt-out. Obviously people on Reddit and HN assumed the worst and by then it was too late to get the truth out. Bit of a shame; I feel like telemetry probably would have been quite useful to them (e.g. for optimising which things are in the toolbar). Though, on the other hand I think Audacity's usability problems are obvious enough that they easily have a decade of work before they get to the point where they run out of things to improve.
sneak 5y ago
Yeah, opt-in is totally fine. I'm straight up militant about opt-out spyware bullshit in apps, but opt-in should be acceptable to everyone.

noisy_boy 5y ago

I recently wanted to split a long mp3 file into individual tracks. I used Audacity for it. As someone with zero experience in sound editing, I expected it to be more complicated than it turned out to be. We need to have such open source applications available to us without fear of telemetry sharing with ad companies. Glad to see the decision.

Ninn 5y ago
Based on your stance it seems that you have not seen the intentions declared in the original PR, including opt-in approaches and the use of data solely for development and UX improvements?
- noisy_boy 5y ago
  I just don't want to take the chance about telemetry data being used for monetization, now or in future. Also, the original PR's setup meant that even if I wanted to share telemetry, there was no way for me to share that without it going to Google/Yandex. And I definitely don't trust them.
  - eterevsky 5y ago
    So, first of all, as someone who works for Google, I don't think you should be worried about it. Using personal data is currently pretty strictly regulated. Using 3rd party analytics data in such a way would likely be illegal (IANAL and I'm not writing this comment on behalf of Google). And even in the worst case, supposing that Google and Yandex are evil, what's your exact concern? That you presses on Play and Record buttons will be used to target ads?
    - svrtknst 5y ago
      Imo the last part is a bit too dismissive. It's not too hard to imagine how telemetry from software can be used for ad targeting, or for more nefarious purposes, since the telemetry would have access to track info, including metadata. If we're imagining worst-case scenarios, my first thought is "use track info to discover unlicensed music usage". Or for ads.

OJFord 5y ago

I often think, especially if you have 'technical' users, better than telemetry is just making it easy to tell you things. I frequently want to be able to just quickly say 'gah, that was annoying, I clicked that instead of that because I thought it would do that, not seeing this covered by those' or whatever, just vent a little bit, and vaguely hope it might be improved. Not a support chat, happy to have fa follow-up email if more information needed and it's actually being worked on I suppose, but generally just a quick easy fire and forget. Like telemetry, but where the user provides all the content; not a glorified yes/no to content you've guessed ahead of time.

dataduck 5y ago
Subnautica had this in early access: a "feedback" function where you chose either a smiley or sad face, filled in a free text field, and one click sent it to the devs. From what I hear this worked pretty well.
- tux3 5y ago
  Yup. And Visual Studio has Send a Smile/Frown, firefox had something similar plus a "Report site issue" button that takes you to a simple web form. Those things are not super hard to put in place, and seems like a great way to get feedback that people wouldn't travel all the way to the Github issue tracker for =)
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    Visula studio is also teeming with telemetry, though.
synthmeat 5y ago
Yup, this has been best advice I've listened last year, and subsequently built on-site community chatbox. It's been amazing source of QA, feature ideas, discovering who are the real people using the service... We even hired from it. My only reservation was that it won't scale but even for userbase of 100s of thousands registered and millions of uniques a month (in the parlance of dumb telemetry), it has! I love it. To anticipate "why not just discord/telegram/whatever channel/server" - doesn't work as well, there's certain immediacy of it being purpose-built and being right there on site, that's apparently very valuable.

LegitShady 5y ago

There is some fishy stuff going on with audacity and "muse" that nobody involved seems to be able to just say out loud simply. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/880 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/880 Personally I would rather use closed source reaper or an audicity fork than deal with whatever is going on with audacity. Everyone involved seems to have been sworn to secrecy which generally tells me it's not in my best interest to get involved and pit myself in a position where this conspiracy has any influence over me.

jraph 5y ago
Can you point out the problems shown by this discussion? Because I can't. The concerns are legitimate but let's give Muse some time to answer properly. I haven't seen anything shady… other than the initial telemetry thing that has been widely fixed. The community has been listened, I see this as an actually very positive thing for Muse. I'm very happy to see private companies take care of open source projects (if they do it properly, obviously)
- Jiejeing 5y ago
  The history of musescore is not really the brightest, which may explain why people do not trust them much ([0] and discussion). Yes, they shelved telemetry and listened to the community, which is good, but they still proposed an intrusive change without discussion and only turned back because the outrage was big enough. [0] https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issue-562094186 https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issu...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- LegitShady 5y ago
  >he concerns are legitimate but let's give Muse some time to answer properly. It's 6 days old, and they have some responses in the discussion but nothing that clarifies what was going on. It appears to be heavily NDA'd. Musescore has done some interesting things https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5 https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5

igorkraw 5y ago

Well, that's nice to see. Let's hope both Muse and the community can have a productive exchange now that a sign of good faith (dropping Google Yandex, changing the source default to be telemetry free, making much clearer what is connected and why) has been offered.

andybak 5y ago

Anyone here want to speak up for opt-out telemetry to help understand product usage patterns? Surely "opt-in" destroys any validity the data would have (self selected groups are usually a poor proxy for typical users) even aside from the massive drop-off in participation.

maweki 5y ago
Considering the people who would give out their zip-code in the supermarket at checkout, I would hazard the guess that the less technical crowd would opt in and that their feedback or telemetry on what makes a simple UI is more valuable.
- ziml77 5y ago
  But in the case of a checkout where you give info letting them track your purchases, you get discounts in return. Audacity isn't offering anything in return for opting in to telemetry.
  - svrtknst 5y ago
    What you're getting in return is improved UX and performance, albeit it is a more abstract and collective gain than discounts. You also get (unless you are a contributor, I guess) a very capable and transparent music editing software for free.
  - maweki 5y ago
    In Germany I have never been offered a discount in that manner. Coupons are the only way to do this here.
    - majewsky 5y ago
      I'm also German. Once, when I was asked for my zip code at checkout, I asked what they use it for. The cashier said it's being used to decide where to distribute physical advertisements (those store-branded magazines that land in your mailbox every week which list all the items that are on sale next week). I can't know how much truth there is to it, so take it with a grain of salt.

contingencies 5y ago

Literally just used it (still open) to to create an audio performance for my kid's schoolwork. I use it once a year on average, all platforms, for a decade or more. It's awesome, though the whole import/export is not save/load thing seems superfluous. While this makes sense to programmers, for normal user UX I would recommend removing that and just normalize to save/save-as with warnings if data is being lost. Telemetry or advertising would make me use alternatives.

nemetroid 5y ago
In high school, one of my teachers flubbed the recordings of an oral exam by having multiple student recordings in a single Audacity session and only saving a version with all tracks overlaid on each other. If anything, I think save/export need to be made more distinct.
pdpi 5y ago
Import/export has its own distinct meaning that is unrelated to save. It’s common to almost every content creation tool that has a distinction between an editing format (eg .psd, .reason, .fcpx) and a publishing format (.jpeg, .mp3, .mp4)
frabbit 5y ago
Sounds like some sort of plagiarism if you are doing your kids schoolwork. Let them do it themselves.

andensande 5y ago

Not related as such, but worth pointing out. The author of this discussion - and the project manager of Audacity - is Tantacrul, who is, in my opinion, one of the best music youtubers around. His video[0] on corporate music was fantastic, and his video on Shostakovich[1] made me totally reconsider his music. Plus, he's funny! So there's that. Highly recommend! [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCxzMYVvHBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCxzMYVvHBg

jraph 5y ago
His reviews of the various scorewriters (Sibelius, Musescore, Dorico) are also fantastic, even if you are not into music. His review of Musescore lead him to become the project manager of Musescore, and probably of Audacity as a consequence. His video Stock Music & Reality TV - How to Misrepresent the World [1] is also really good. [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I

williesleg 5y ago

HA HA assholes got caught!

marsven_422 5y ago

Time to fork!

efficax 5y ago

The hysteria about this is absurd. To make product decisions you need to measure actual usage patterns. To do that you need telemetry.

readflaggedcomm 5y ago
No, you don't. You could talk to people, instead.
- tester756 5y ago
  then you'll have opinion of vocal minority
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    Yes. Hopefully developers and power users, if they're chosen correctly and given the proper incentives (like having their ideas implemented).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- efficax 5y ago
  Surveys and user interviews are also useful, but nothing beats having the data. And usually we use the telemetry data for the app to craft the surveys and interviews. Did you stick a cool feature on a dialog but nobody ever uses it? Telemetry tells us that's something to look into. The thing is that this is very easy to do with web apps, since you get a ton of telemetry for free through API requests. A desktop app is s black box without telemetry. Just release and pray
  - atatatat 5y ago
    A 10-30 min walkthrough+interview of how 5 users use the software will elicit by who and why the dialog isn't being used.
- 5y ago

kenniskrag 5y ago

"log a non-reversible hash of the IP address to improve the accuracy of the daily statistics." 2**32 IP addresses seems not to be hard to reverse. Am I wrong?

simias 5y ago
For sure, unless they use a very computationally expensive hash. Beyond that I'm not sure why they'd get from that, given that non-static IP addresses are very common on the internet and NATed networks even more so.
- kenniskrag 5y ago
  IP are considered PII and are regulated. So the easiest way is to avoid PII.
layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
If you XOR the four octets into a single byte then it’s definitely irreversible :^) (and also pretty useless for telemetry purposes)
je42 5y ago
they could also just generate an "installation" id ? this also works more accurately when the computer switches ip addresses.
- kenniskrag 5y ago
  > works more accurately That's what they want to avoid. An advantage is, that you can ask the user for the id an check the logs for debugging.
- jefftk 5y ago
  You could generate an 128-bit installation ID and then send [date, hash(id, date)]. Now when you're debugging with a user you can ask for their ID and see which traffic is theirs.

cardanome 5y ago

There is no good reason to put any form of telemetry in a non commercial open source project, ever. It is just user hostile behavior. Yes, even if it is opt out. Good to see it got pushed back. Let's see for how long. Yes, people will say it "helps make the product better" but open source software, especially the GPL flavor, is for serving the user first and foremost, not making the developers job easier and I strongly doubt it really helps with the later. People these days are just horribly addicted to data gathering and believe quantitative methods for analyzing problems are the only right way. Probably for need to justify their job. Every good open source project is getting more than enough good qualitative feedback from the community that you should focus on. Improve the tool for the people that actually use it and are part of the community and not for some potential new users you hope to generate.

masklinn 5y ago
> There is no good reason to put any form of telemetry in a non commercial open source project, ever. That's simply not true, and there are absolutely reasons to put telemetry in projects, including non-commercial open-source projects e.g. tracing performance issues, tracing crashes and other bugs, collecting stats on feature usage (to know what to focus on or what to surface better) or workflows (to know what to improve support for, or what to better document if there are better ways to do things in the project). Getting useful feedback directly from users is difficult, and doubly so when you have no activity traces to go with it. The average Audacity user is never going to capture ETW traces when they have issues, and odds are they'll complain on audio tools forums rather than your own. I'm absolutely sensitive to the argument that telemetry is commonly misused and offline software adding telemetry is dodgy and icky, but pretending telemetry is necessarily useless and bad is just fals. > Every good open source project is getting more than enough good qualitative feedback from the community that you should focus on. 1. they really dont 2. especially for a project aimed mainly at non-dev users (which is what Audacity is), it's very unlikely that the feedback you get is relevant to the majority of your userbase
- cardanome 5y ago
  We disagree about the goals non-commercial open-source projects should have. I am focusing on serving the (established) users, you on things that might help the developers. I does not matter to me how much telemetry might help development at all. Even if all those things you listed were substantially helping improve development, nope I don't care. Software should serve the user and only the user. As a user I don't have any benefit from the use of telemetry. Sure maybe it might help fix issues in futures version for me but again it does not benefit me as a user of the current version of the software. I am well aware of the benefits of telemetry. If you develop commercial software it is absolutely critical to gather as much data as possible. But again the goal of open source non commercial projects should not be success at all cost. But to argue about the benefits of telemetry for arguments sake, nope raw data is not really that useful, turning it into actionable insights is still a job on its own. Software has been developed without telemetry for decades. There is lot's of way. From getting testers to actual user surveys and so on.

astatine 5y ago

>the convenience of using Yandex and Google is at odds with the public perception of trustworthiness What's the likelihood that this will percolate to non-technical services? If more services think like this, maybe there is hope.

Kiro 5y ago

OT but am I the only one always opting in on telemetry prompts? I want the developers to get as much info possible to improve the app and fix issues.

NazakiAid 5y ago
I think more people would if the telemetry was not using Google and Yandex to get the analytics and instead used their own servers and API that no third-parties have access to. Also if there had been more discussion in the first place before implementing this opt-in telemetry.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Yes - my problem with telemetry is never to hide from the app's developer, it's to hide from scum like Google and Facebook, or even "innocent" paid analytics providers like Mixpanel because while those don't profit off my data, they still concentrate it into a single place which would be a problem if leaked or misused.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    s/if/when/ By new management, broke developers, advertisers, data brokers, criminals in government, etc.
- Kiro 5y ago
  Can't argue with you there. I actually didn't know apps used Google for that. I always just presumed it went to their own servers.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Fantastic, that's your choice. Does this shed light on the subject?

lmeyerov 5y ago

Super non-obvious to a lot of people despite good intentions, so good on Audacity for following up. We were surprised w something similar in Caddy 1: managed sw can monitor, self-hosted shouldn't unless manually added with real friction and alarm bells, vs default on, click through, etc. Otherwise, it's a time bomb that will burn your brand for a long time. Messing up trust issues like violating privacy isn't just about the immediate incident, but the ones you already missed and the ones in the future. Telemetry is a recurring footgun here.

pabs3 5y ago

The only well-done telemetry I have seen in open source is what 0ad does. Everything is fully opt-in and very transparent.

ergot_vacation 5y ago

So we've gone from "Spy on the users in an open-ended way that can grow ever larger" to "If it crashes, you can push a button to send us a report" and an automatic update check (not automatic download!). Both of which can be turned off. That seems reasonable. That said, this has vaporized any trust I had in in Muse group, and it's not coming back any time soon. When big companies "acquire" high quality software or sites, the result is almost always either a. Destruction of the property in an attempt to monetize or b. They mostly forget about it and it gradually rusts away from neglect. Here's hoping Audacity is somehow an exception.

rozab 5y ago
It was opt in. There's barely any difference, except crash reports have far more personally identifiable data like hardware configuration.
- 3836293648 5y ago
  That means nothing. The issue is having it at all. Changing it from opt in to opt out is a tiny change that can sneak past people checking

garaetjjte 5y ago

>These decisions took time to arrive at because - despite my role as the lead on the project - calls on this specific issue are not mine to make. That's just sounds like huge red flag to me.

pessimizer 5y ago
Only real suspect line in the entire OP, and retroactively justifies the angry user response. Whatever arguments one can make for developers and designers to use telemetry to improve the software are irrelevant. Instead, the owners were making a business decision to add telemetry, not the project lead, and that's the beginning of an attack on the users.