You're right. Neither of these things are proof of honesty but to be clear, I would never work on a project that collects or misuses user data. This isn’t really a matter of “taking my word for it,” either. If anything like that were happening, it would be visible in the codebase, which anyone can look through (and many have). The app simply can’t transmit data without explicit instructions in the code.
Audacity does not store any personal information of any kind, and never did.
We're using the framework my team on MuseScore Studio created for the UI in Audacity. This allows us to port over the significant amount of screen reader support we built over there too.
We'll need to spend time making sure it's applying correctly to every corner of the app - but when it's done, the app will be far more broadly supported than V3.
Audacity does not store any personal information of any kind, and never did.