Steam is shitty spyware, Valve's by far the scummiest company in the gaming business, and Gay Jewell's the biggest parasite in that business, yet /v/ treats this cocksucking predator like Jesus Christ. If you're cuckolded so bad you use Steam, you have gaming disorder, a mental health condition that affects between 1.7% and 10% of the U.S. population, which the WHO and DSM-5 characterize by continued or escalated gaming despite negative consequences. You're either too retarded to evaluate these negative consequences, too pathetic a cuckold to care, or both.
Steam has a privacy policy that details that it collects your name, address, credit card number(s), e-mail, age, IP address, device unique ID, chat logs, forum posts, voice chat recordings, and hardware enumeration.
Steam confirms it shares this information with third parties. Steam knows your name, age, where you live, your banking information, and email and shares this with other companies. They can use your IP address to track where you are to the nearest county and can use your device unique ID provided by the fingerprinting spyware inside Steam to track yopur usage habits across devices that you use. Steam also records all of your communications with others through its social networking and instant messaging services, such as all chat logs, voice conversations, and forum posts, and can share this with third parties as well.
Steam has a VAC system that records your internet history and uploads it to an official Valve server. Valve has the ability to spy on a user's internet history. The spyware feature is programmed into Valve's software and the internet history is processed by Valve's servers.
Steam can't be built from an available copy of the source code.
Steam records and publicly broadcasts your program usage habits for all programs launched through Steam's program launching service. This spyware feature is mandatory and has no opt-out. Steam also uses its social network features such as the user profile and friends list to broadcast a user's program usage habits publicly. This spyware feature can be partially disabled by setting your profile to private, but it cannot be opted-out of if you are using the "friends" social networking feature.
Steam has the spyware feature which allows you to "opt-in" to certain features of the Steam service by providing Steam your telephone number. This is done through a pop-up that cannot be turned off. This spyware feature is encouraged by Steam and Steam locks out certain features and privileges to users who want to protect their privacy- for example, access to the Steam store which is an online marketplace run by Valve requires you to give your phone number. So it is impossible to use all features of the software without giving up this kind of information.
Steam phones home and requires an internet connection. Steam will phone home whenever the Steam client is opened or a program is launched through Steam. This spyware feature is mandatory and cannot be turnedoff. Steam provides an offline mode which is not an opt-out because users must still connect to Steam servers every 30 days or so.
Steam contains a mandatory self-updater and doesn't work without an internet connection. It updates itself without user verification. This is not an opt-out feature because eventually Steam will stop working until it is updated. Self-updating software can be used to install spyware features or force users to agree to new agreements that force them to explicitly give up more information to continue using the spyware program.
I pirate games I transfer by USB to a device disconnected from the internet because I'm not a pathetic, retarded, gaming disordered cuckold paying Gay Jewell to fuck me up my ass.