Please have a look at the URL above. It looks like Audacity is drifting to the dark side (see also Bug 788832). Reproducible: Always
https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213#issuecomment-873547330 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/8a75211548d66c75dd001aeb33e470d0e38b9974/CMakeLists.txt#L178 In general, the environment variables necessary for Sentry and crash reporting to work are not set by Gentoo (crash reporting maybe should be set to bugs.gentoo.org?). So the Gentoo build of Audacity does not have any telemetry. Just to be certain, the ebuild could use this argument to mycmakeargs to disable all network activity, thought it appears it's off by default: -Daudacity_has_networking=no
There is also the problem that they now state that Audacity may not be used by people under the age of 13, which violates the GPL. cf. Privacy Notice at https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/ item 3.
It's probably best for now to wait until either a definitive fork emerged or a replacement application is chosen by the community. For what it's worth, Gentoo already has PipeWire with functional JACK emulation, so it's not too far-fetched to replace Audacity with something like Ardour, though my experience with that in the past days has still been rather rough even with pipewire-9999 and realtime capable user account.
What about replacing with https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity ?
I'm aware of, I believe, two forks and an obligatory Rust rewrite - I strongly suggest waiting for the dust to settle before directing existing Audacity users in one directory or another. All that's to be done right now is to ensure that 1) existing versions are clean of any spying or otherwise problematic code (not aware of any for the version 2.4.2 that's in the main tree) and that 2) no tainted version or patches are added before it's hopefully removed from the tree in due course.
As a matter of record, further changes to the privacy policy have now been made, with a long explanation here: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/1353 I would point out that there was a lot of pressure from the development and support team to ensure that a privacy policy existed before there was a release which included any networking (and users on other platforms have been requesting "check for updates" for years). Better to publish something and have issues raised in public than to not have a policy at all? (Note that I an no longer involved with the upstream project apart from reading some of the public mailing lists).
Considering how the Muse project (now owned by the same Muse Group as Audacity) silently changed Fluid R3 soundfont that they offer for download without any explanation that it's some kind of forked/modified version and both programs include phone home capabilities, I'm very reluctant to trust them on anything.
