Does Valve collect the browsing history of its users as part of its efforts to thwart cheating in games? No, says Valve’s Gabe Newell, taking the unusual step of responding to a Reddit thread that claimed the company’s VAC anti-cheating system “reads all the domains you have visited and sends it back to their servers.”
Newell explains in the post that Valve normally doesn’t talk publicly about VAC, because the additional information can give cheaters additional insights into hacking the system. But he considered this situation important enough to warrant a public response.
Read Newell’s full post on Reddit here, but his concluding Q&A sums it up nicely:
- Do we send your browsing history to Valve? No.
- Do we care what porn sites you visit? Oh, dear god, no. My brain just melted.
- Is Valve using its market success to go evil? I don’t think so, but you have to make the call if we are trustworthy. We try really hard to earn and keep your trust.
Valve’s Steam has become the dominant game platform on PCs, with some 65 million registered users, and it’s expanding further into the living room this year with Steam Box machines from a variety of third-party hardware makers.
