Asked not to is different from forbidden though, no? I’m not a legal expert but I doubt this clause is one they wanted to put in and is probably driven by some legal counsel with an eye on international law.
The specific situation being pointed out here is that the software is/was used in public schools. It doesn't really fit in the category of "if nobody knows, nobody cares, and nobody wants to know" that you'll find on your on personal device.
The school installing software that has terms not allowing those under 13 to use it, because those kids don't have the legal right to consent to the software collecting information from them, has a very real chance of becoming an issue - both for the school and whoever made the decision.
It sounds like any Internet use by children in schools would be a legal issue, then. If IP addresses are considered personally identifiable information subject to consent policies, then ordinary web logging is data collection that a child can not consent to.
A more direct example would be in Chrome/Firefox/etc automatically checking for updates, which is the equivalent of what Audacity describes in the linked post.
> It sounds like any Internet use by children in schools would be a legal issue, then. If IP addresses are considered personally identifiable information subject to consent policies, then ordinary web logging is data collection that a child can not consent to.
It's not going to happen for all kinds of reasons, but there's a lot that could be said in favour of prohibiting _unsupervised_ Internet access to children 12 and under.
In this case, children 12 and below cannot give consent but they can use the app if parental consent is given.
Having children in that age range use the app would require Audacity to seek parental consent by "[making] reasonable efforts (taking into account the available technology and risks inherent in the processing) to verify that the person providing consent holds parental responsibility for the child."1
While they wrote to minors "please do not use the App", they also wrote "The App we provide is not intended for individuals below the age of 13."2 Not being a lawyer, I cannot talk about the implications of these passages.
The school installing software that has terms not allowing those under 13 to use it, because those kids don't have the legal right to consent to the software collecting information from them, has a very real chance of becoming an issue - both for the school and whoever made the decision.