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Come on. Everybody sends crash reports so their developers can fix bugs that cause crashes. Audacity doesn't have incriminating data about its users. Are you

Come on. Everybody sends crash reports so their developers can fix bugs that cause crashes. Audacity doesn't have incriminating data about its users. Are you seriously worried that the KGB is gonna request your extradition because of the filenames of some mp3s you were editing when a crash occurred?

tohnjitor 5y ago
Are you seriously not?
- rattray 5y ago
  :) I am seriously not! EDIT: I am worried about governments coming after some people, but I am not worried that Audacity's ToS telemetry or ToS will be pivotal to their success in doing so. Just look at Assange – they got him on falsified rape charges, not his history of torrents or website visits.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    The rape charges against Assange may have been partly exaggerated, but calling them "falsified" is so much of an exaggeration that it itself comes closer to being a falsification than the charges ever were.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Downvotes are still not all that convincing as logical arguments.
toyg 5y ago
Unless you are in Belarus or "South Ossetia", the KGB does not exist anymore. The FSB, on the other hand, does; and I wouldn't put past them to try stuff that even the original KGB probably would not have dared.
- rattray 5y ago
  I intended "KGB" as a stand-in for "Government Intelligence and Law Enforcement Bureaus" but in the specific case of the FSB I doubt they'd give a rat's ass what a Terms of Service contains if they really wanted to come after somebody.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  It doesn't really matter very much if they're called NKVD or the Cheka or whatever, does it?
geofft 5y ago
"Everybody"? Emacs does not. vim does not. OpenSSH does not. Python does not. ffmpeg does not. I think this is a culture-clash question. Open source software generally does no automated crash reporting. Some software like the Rust compiler will print out a crash report and ask you to copy/paste it into a GitHub issue on your own; you can decide not to. The general cultural assumption is that if you want the software to get better, you have to participate, and if you don't participate, the developers don't owe it to you to fix your crashes. In fact, with the software I mentioned above, you generally don't even get it directly from the developer; you get it from a redistributor like a Linux distro, who may have modified it. Therefore it may not even make sense to send crash reports directly to the original developers, and the social contract is between you and the redistributor. Some open-source software like VLC does prompt you to send crash reports if you want, but it doesn't send them by default, and their data collection terms say nothing about law enforcement (https://www.videolan.org/privacy.html https://www.videolan.org/privacy.html Some open-source software that operates at a scale that resembles traditional "shrink-wrapped" (conceptually) software does even more telemetry - Firefox, for instance, but even so it doesn't say anything about collecting data for law enforcement: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ There's also a world of closed-source software where there isn't any culture of participation and where asking a user to file a bug makes little sense. This is the world of Windows and macOS and mobile apps, all of which do automated crash reports. This is the world of web analytics tools that track exactly where your mouse cursor pointed so developers can build more intuitive websites, and more generally, the world in which software runs online and server-side because it helps developers. The social contract here is that the developers improve the software fix bugs without your active participation, and in turn the software needs to send them data about how you use it - both crash reports and general usage data - on its own, without you doing anything. The real question is which world Audacity now lives in. A clause like "data necessary for law enforcement" is perfectly standard for websites, and probably they copied and pasted it from some standard terms of service document. But can you imagine Emacs or Python having such terms?
- rattray 5y ago
  I don't understand why you're comparing Audacity to Python. ffmpeg would be a much better comparison to emacs or python – and I admit I'd be surprised if ffmpeg was emitting telemetry like crash reports. Audacity's more comparable peer would be Adobe Photoshop. I'd expect crash reports in a GUI app like either of these. I'd also expect that anyone with data on a server would need a clause like "data necessary for law enforcement". I would not expect that law enforcement regularly hounds Adobe for data from crash reports.
AlbertCory 5y ago
Yes, there are crash reports, but AFAICT they are all but universally ignored. Example: Verizon's "Message+" for the Mac crashes for almost any reason, including "you just selected an old conversation." I allowed its auto crash report to work, several times. I gave them a negative rating on the Play Store, citing this. They wrote and asked me for details on "the problem" so they could fix it. I told them to start testing their software. If you're a developer on the other end of these things for some company, please speak up. How many are actually looked at?
- boolemancer 5y ago
  I formerly worked on $LARGE_SOFTWARE for $COMPANY and would frequently get bug reports for crashes, and spent a reasonable amount of time analyzing memory dumps to understand what was causing those crashes so that they could be fixed. I think correlating those automated crash dumps with reviews in a software distribution channel would have been non-trivial, and not something I would have spent time on though.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    Good on you (and the other guy). In this case, though, I think you would have said about the review "Oh, yeah, that's the embarrassing bug where it crashes when you do something totally ordinary. Fixed (or fixing) that."
- Forge36 5y ago
  "every single one" (At least on my team) That said I'd say I fixed 95% of the crashes, even the trivial ones. The remainder were difficult enough to understand the cause (ie: out of memory and we got caught holding the stick) that risk of change outweighed fixing.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Given their history I prefer they not have any data on me. Who knows what they will read into it.

tohnjitor 5y ago

Are you seriously not?

rattray 5y ago
:) I am seriously not! EDIT: I am worried about governments coming after some people, but I am not worried that Audacity's ToS telemetry or ToS will be pivotal to their success in doing so. Just look at Assange – they got him on falsified rape charges, not his history of torrents or website visits.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  The rape charges against Assange may have been partly exaggerated, but calling them "falsified" is so much of an exaggeration that it itself comes closer to being a falsification than the charges ever were.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Downvotes are still not all that convincing as logical arguments.

toyg 5y ago

Unless you are in Belarus or "South Ossetia", the KGB does not exist anymore. The FSB, on the other hand, does; and I wouldn't put past them to try stuff that even the original KGB probably would not have dared.

rattray 5y ago
I intended "KGB" as a stand-in for "Government Intelligence and Law Enforcement Bureaus" but in the specific case of the FSB I doubt they'd give a rat's ass what a Terms of Service contains if they really wanted to come after somebody.
CRConrad 5y ago
It doesn't really matter very much if they're called NKVD or the Cheka or whatever, does it?

geofft 5y ago

"Everybody"? Emacs does not. vim does not. OpenSSH does not. Python does not. ffmpeg does not. I think this is a culture-clash question. Open source software generally does no automated crash reporting. Some software like the Rust compiler will print out a crash report and ask you to copy/paste it into a GitHub issue on your own; you can decide not to. The general cultural assumption is that if you want the software to get better, you have to participate, and if you don't participate, the developers don't owe it to you to fix your crashes. In fact, with the software I mentioned above, you generally don't even get it directly from the developer; you get it from a redistributor like a Linux distro, who may have modified it. Therefore it may not even make sense to send crash reports directly to the original developers, and the social contract is between you and the redistributor. Some open-source software like VLC does prompt you to send crash reports if you want, but it doesn't send them by default, and their data collection terms say nothing about law enforcement (https://www.videolan.org/privacy.html https://www.videolan.org/privacy.html Some open-source software that operates at a scale that resembles traditional "shrink-wrapped" (conceptually) software does even more telemetry - Firefox, for instance, but even so it doesn't say anything about collecting data for law enforcement: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ There's also a world of closed-source software where there isn't any culture of participation and where asking a user to file a bug makes little sense. This is the world of Windows and macOS and mobile apps, all of which do automated crash reports. This is the world of web analytics tools that track exactly where your mouse cursor pointed so developers can build more intuitive websites, and more generally, the world in which software runs online and server-side because it helps developers. The social contract here is that the developers improve the software fix bugs without your active participation, and in turn the software needs to send them data about how you use it - both crash reports and general usage data - on its own, without you doing anything. The real question is which world Audacity now lives in. A clause like "data necessary for law enforcement" is perfectly standard for websites, and probably they copied and pasted it from some standard terms of service document. But can you imagine Emacs or Python having such terms?

rattray 5y ago
I don't understand why you're comparing Audacity to Python. ffmpeg would be a much better comparison to emacs or python – and I admit I'd be surprised if ffmpeg was emitting telemetry like crash reports. Audacity's more comparable peer would be Adobe Photoshop. I'd expect crash reports in a GUI app like either of these. I'd also expect that anyone with data on a server would need a clause like "data necessary for law enforcement". I would not expect that law enforcement regularly hounds Adobe for data from crash reports.

AlbertCory 5y ago

Yes, there are crash reports, but AFAICT they are all but universally ignored. Example: Verizon's "Message+" for the Mac crashes for almost any reason, including "you just selected an old conversation." I allowed its auto crash report to work, several times. I gave them a negative rating on the Play Store, citing this. They wrote and asked me for details on "the problem" so they could fix it. I told them to start testing their software. If you're a developer on the other end of these things for some company, please speak up. How many are actually looked at?

boolemancer 5y ago
I formerly worked on $LARGE_SOFTWARE for $COMPANY and would frequently get bug reports for crashes, and spent a reasonable amount of time analyzing memory dumps to understand what was causing those crashes so that they could be fixed. I think correlating those automated crash dumps with reviews in a software distribution channel would have been non-trivial, and not something I would have spent time on though.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  Good on you (and the other guy). In this case, though, I think you would have said about the review "Oh, yeah, that's the embarrassing bug where it crashes when you do something totally ordinary. Fixed (or fixing) that."
Forge36 5y ago
"every single one" (At least on my team) That said I'd say I fixed 95% of the crashes, even the trivial ones. The remainder were difficult enough to understand the cause (ie: out of memory and we got caught holding the stick) that risk of change outweighed fixing.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Given their history I prefer they not have any data on me. Who knows what they will read into it.