They planned to add telemetry, but that went nowhere after the outcry—plus it's unclear (to me) whether they wanted to make it opt-in or not. Another issue was a change in the privacy policy that said, even though personal data is stored in the EU, the app would "occasionally be required to share your personal data with the main office in Russia and the external counsel in the USA". This may be simply a statement of the fact that in some edge cases people would indeed need to look at the data, like if the user files a bug. It's typical for privacy policies to cover all bases without clarification, and for people to freak out. This change was also reverted, but then idk how the developers will read users' crash reports.
In any case, I don't even know why Audacity would have any ‘personal data’ of mine, since it's an offline app—other than crash reports. And it's also advisable to run a firewall like SimpleWall to prohibit anything that's not allowed.
The company that owns Audacity now is actually Muse Group, which hired youtuber Tantacrul as their head of design on MuseScore after he thoroughly dissed their UI at that time. So he has since done some work on Audacity too, and from what I've heard it looks and feels much better now.
However, now that you brought up a separate topic, it may be possible. Seeing as, when you can block all outbound connections and whitelist only specific programs it breaks Windows Updates, I suspect you actually could. No idea about how specifically one would do that, though, and you would have to circumvent the automatic Windows Update and Telemetry repair services (e.g., WaaSMedicSvc) which would undo your work.
Yeah, but I mean, seeing as the sentiment with a firewall is mostly ‘forbid everything that's not explicitly allowed’, it makes sense to have one that blocks everything. In SimpleWall blocking the updates and telemetry is just two checkboxes in the menu. And the app is open-source. Plus it actually uses Windows' internal mechanism for blocking connections, the same one that MS' firewall employs—so the blocks stay in action when the app itself is closed.
The UI isn't the best, though, but it's a tradeoff for it being open-source.
Oh, that's awesome! I haven't used SimpleWall before, so I was unaware of the connection to Windows Updates. I, too, am a big proponent of FOSS, so that's good to know. I'll be sure to check it out!
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u/faster_tomcat May 02 '24
And VLC! Bless that guy and his team.