Audacity sends your personal data to Russia and other ‘third parties’

Popular free audio editing tool Audacity has quietly updated its terms and conditions so that it can sell user data to third-party companies and share it “with our main office in Russia”.

The update, which happened on 2 July 2021, means that Audacity will now collect information about users’ operating system, their country (through their IP address), their CPU, and any other data “necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests”.

For “a calendar day”, IP addresses will be “stored in an identifiable way” before being hashed or made anonymous; however, an unencrypted address could be a pathway to finding a users’ name, phone number, and address, the geolocation of the computer, and in some cases further personal characteristics including “political inclinations, state of health, sexuality, [and] religious sentiments”, according to a study conducted in 2013 by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.