[LWinterberg]

You may want to actually read the privacy policy, particularly point 4: "We do not store or share any personal information."

Regarding Audacity becoming a paid product or closed source, look at the rest of Muse Group: Musescore (the notation program) is free and open source, musescoreCOM (the website) makes money. If Musescore didn't exist or was hard to access (ie paid), musescoreCOM would have way less content and thus would make way less money.

Now look back at Audacity: There's Audacity (the program) and then there's audioCOM (the website). Audacity, being the thing which has a dedicated upload button to it, is definitely the main source of content for this website.

Now, why would Muse make Audacity paid and completely cripple audioCOM with it? And what money would they make from selling it? Wouldn't people just be able to download Audacity 3.2 from literally anywhere because it's GPL'd anyway?