Short answer: yes
Long-ish answer: https://tosdr.org/en/service/180
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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tl;dr: no more than any other similar company
Read their privacy policy, I guess.
Usually those documents leave many legal back doors open, just in case. It doesn’t automatically mean that they are currently backstabbing you, but they want to have that option available to them. If you see lots of open doors like that, they are there for a reason. An honest company doesn’t need any, whereas a shady company wants all of them.
I thought it was a title to an article but it turn out it was someone who mistook Lemmy for a search engine
What if it IS a search engine? Maybe there's a site out there that posts every question to a random fediverse sub!
Matter of fact, let's make one. We'll just use scripts to post every question to social media but program it to say the wrong thing first so that it gets instant results when everyone jumps on the "person" who was wrong. Brilliant!
Not that long ago, they drastically improved their privacy policy, consent and opt-out capabilities. Is it perfect? No but it has never been better.
Yes obviously. This is their privacy policy. https://store.steampowered.com/privacy_agreement/
It wasn't that long ago they got caught downloading everyone's DNS caches in real time. That means any website you access, Steam lets Gabe know. Also any website you accessed in the past, even while Steam was off at the time.
I don't know how trustworthy these people are, but Common.org rated them worse than they did Facebook.
Would flatpak mitigate this?
I'm not an expert on Flatpak, but yes, I believe Flatpak comprehensively protects you from applications snooping on your systemd resolve cache. I was talking about the Windows version of Steam in my previous comment.
Sounds like a death sentence to me
If you consider the way you choose to allocate your time and and a portion of your entertainment budget private… then yes.
Curious to learn if it's limited to data within Steam itself or more. So far the only thing that I saw that could change my behavior is the start screen on Steam (even if I start games, e.g BG3) straight from my KDE menu. Curious to know if that can be disabled.
it's named .desktop, steam put them on your .local/share/application
Thanks for the clarification but seems I wasn't clear. I know how to start a game without Steam and how .desktop work (made some before). What I meant is rather can I start Steam itself to avoid their welcome screen and go straight to my game library? This way I would avoid their "suggestions" which are, in fine, ads (and thus what I imagine they collect private data for).
Yes.
You can disable the ad popup window and you can set your start page to library. It's all in the settings somewhere.
There are many tools for Linux that do a lot of different stuff
I remember there were some that allowed running games straight without steam and maybe even creating shortcuts, but any of those is a headache to setup, I mean, to run a game without steam you need to do 15 manual steps, to create a shortcut 30 manual steps
Edit: maybe something has changed, I don't use steam a lot, and I used those tools some years ago
P.s. the coolest tool for me is the app for extracting tye session with all those steam guard and etc
They can potentially collect a lot of stuff but I dont really see a reason why they would sell / use it for anything besides analytics/marketing internally
To be fair what really pissed me about Steam was the push into CS:2 without no regard for anyone (macOS?) or any machine that can't run it... and a few other similar situations like the SimCity 4 version that is buggy and unreliable unlike the gog one that actually has all the required patches for modern hardware.
Can't you still get the old counter strike by using the beta channels?
And I mean... Ultimately blame Apple for being a pain in the butt and not supporting vulkan.
Just install Linux on the Mac and it should support Vulkan just fine (unless it's on an M chip)
Just use Steam Flatpak on Linux. Forget Steam on Windows or Mac.
Yeah having filesystem sandboxing will totally save you from game analytics and tracking, and when you block networking you should have just pirated the games and not felt with Steam in the first place.
Do you even know the problem with Steam? It reads DNS cache from storage to spy on users' personal Internet browsing habits. Filesystem sandboxing solves that problem. If your problem is game analytics, then you may have much bigger problems on your hands. OP might not be as tech savvy or paranoid as you. And if OP is, consider providing good, non malware 🏴☠️ sources to OP via a link or comment from elsewhere.
shocked face