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Steam Spy is pretty much dead
Nilden
Member EpicPosts: 3,916
R.I.P.
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/
Comments
As a gamer, and one that likes a lot of info to make decisions on, i am quite mixed. Losing some data, that will most likely never be back, just makes it easier for shady practices to flourish.
And I'm supposed to be upset this has stopped?
I think not
I'm annoyed some people moan like bi***es because steam increased my privacy and it affected their revenue.
This information should never have been public, it's like my bank sharing what purchases I made on my bank account to show which are the more popular shops...
The GDPR is attempting a massive paradigm shift in the way we think about personal data. It is shifting ownership of personal data back onto the data subjects (us) and companies will now have to explicitly tell us what data they are collecting, where that data is stored and what the data is used for.
Beyond that, it is enshrining in law 8 new rights that we have over our own personal data. The one most of you will have heard of is the right to be forgotten, but the other 7 are just as important.
So, my expectation is this change to Steam is just Valve getting ready for the GDPR next month. Allowing Steam Spy access to the data if it includes personal data will be against the law soon. A username or a user ID counts as personal data. If Valve want to open up the data again then they will have to anonymise it first.
The penalties for non-compliance with these new laws are quite severe too. You can be fined up to 20million euros or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is highest. For a massive company like Valve, the fine would be absolutely massive so they're not going to want to take risks.
I'm really curious to see how Facebook are going to handle the GDPR as it has the potential to ruin the business. For example, we are gaining new rights regarding automated decision making and profiling and can request that our personal data is not used for this. Automated decision making and profiling is how Facebook's advertising platform works (and is what was exploited to influence the US election) so I would guess that they won't be able to charge as much for advertising as it won't be as targeted as before. Assuming they comply and don't find a loophole....
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
I read the small print and my bank doesn't
Glad governments are finally moving on this. If anyone is going to make money on my personal information it is going to be me.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
when you signed Steam's terms of service before the change it became public by default with the option to make it private.
now, after the change, the information is private between the user and Valve by default with the option to make it public.
The popular games feed themselves so that information never mattered.I do not think Valve cares at all about you or your personal information,they simply follow the in place laws.This imo as usual with big business all about Valve and not about you.
We all have credit ratings,so your information is already sort of shared and you can bet the government has massive computer files on all of us and intercepts millions of terabytes in information everyday.
I also have seen the past few years that when government officials are caught doing something illegal they cry foul about their personal information and want to completely stop it for obvious reasons.
So there is a lot of good and bad about information sharing,if your local government official is a criminal you want to know right?
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I think it'll end up coming back, it's just that their method of gathering data is going to have to change. If the data captured didn't include any personal data (i.e. username / ID) then it'd be fine.