Valve Offers Up New Privacy Settings For Steam Gamers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve Offers Up New Privacy Settings For Steam Gamers

In wake of recent privacy scandals in the tech world, Valve is now offering new privacy settings for Steam users...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Expanded-Privacy

[humbug]

Cool.

LOL, didn't really expect Valve to react to the whole facebook fiasco.

[faldzip]

Maybe it is not reacting to facebook fiasco but rather to GDPR regulations going live on 25th of May.

[humbug]

To be real though I think in facebook's case the bottom line is that the way they make money is by selling our information. That is their business model. So they are bound to always be at tension with the public and/or authorities.

[Kendji]

Steam is probably the American commercial service platform that I trust the most. They could technically mine lots of data from it.

[humbug]

Steam is probably the American commercial service platform that I trust the most. They could technically mine lots of data from it.

Well obviously valve does mine user game data in order to target new game sales by preference and customize your store etc. Obviously some portion of that data will be shared with the other dev partners on steam in order to provide their game services. It's included in the steam TOS. The reason people consider steam more trustworthy is because of the less sensitive nature of the data (compared to social media) and also because they make their billions by direct transactions on game sales. Not by advertising or selling data. So they would be stupid to jepordize their straightforward business model by doing something shady.

Still I always uncheck the box to 'remember my credit card information'. Cause IMO we have to be on guard against 3rd party intrusion and/or possible negligence from Valve's side. So I choose the hassle of entering my credit card info each time..

[sbolokanov]

Now we need a 64-bit client. That thing is a show stopper for some people. (me included)

[nanonyme]

Now we need a 64-bit client. That thing is a show stopper for some people. (me included)

Flatpak'ed Steam solves these problems

[soulsource]

I don't really get the connection to Tracebook. The privacy settings just influence how other users can see your profile, but doesn't have any effect on how the provider may or may not use the data.
On Farcebook you have been able to customize what other users can see for a very long time now. Didn't change anything regarding tracking advertisements or Facebook collecting and selling user data.

On another note, most games nowadays gather quite a large amount of user data. For instance our upcoming (sadly at least for now Windows only) title Bus Simulator 18 will, if the player explicitly enables this feature, log most user interaction send that data for us in order to allow us to optimize gameplay. The important point here is, that while we explicitly ask players if they want to enable game analytics, other game developers might not be so nice and just put the agreement to the data gathering somewhere in the license agreement...

[Flaburgan]

It's really nice to see the tech world becoming aware that privacy matters. This Cambridge Analytica scandal did have a huge impact and respectful and decentralized projects such as diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org a facebook-like with tags following feature) and mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/ twitter-like) saw thousands of new users joining during the last weeks (see https://the-federation.info and https://mnm.social/ ). It would be nice to see phoronix officially on these networks btw