[gkya]

In my use case as a grad student in phonology and a linguist interested inter alia also in sociophonetics, de-anonymised data could get me in big, career ending trouble. Imagine me studying some minority's language use, even if the revealed data does not put them at a huge risk, I'll get in trouble with the ethics committee. And it might be possible to de-anonymise participants using e.g. file name, location through IP, etc. and get the participants themselves in trouble. Essentially this merging means Audacity for me is categorised as "can't be used in research", as one of the main reasons the rely on FOSS in research is that this shit don't happen. Luckily it's not like this is a web browser where I can't record if this one obscure standard is met, I just record in Praat or Ardour maybe and call it a day.

That's apart from the many other moral issues, of course, like this whole grabbing the work of FOSS community with money thing is pretty disturbing, which inevitably leads me towards using ethical source licences in any programming I might do such that this sort of stuff doesn't happen.

Also the elephant in the room of course is this is opt-in ___for now___. Recall the days Firefox wasn't plagued with privacy blunders and studies and Google money? There's no reason to believe that Audacity won't end up going the way of Mozilla too.