Epic launcher collects Steam friends & play history

Maybe if you're a good boy with high social credit, they may even sponsor a game addiction camp visit after looking at the hours you've logged

 

Ughh.. yeah.. I'd be getting 1000 years dungeon if they saw how many hours I've wasted in space engineers....

 

reddit is great. but you have to ignore the drama that happens on there every day.

 

I don't agree with what you said about "torrent anything they poach"... why play the game to begin with? Piracy should never be the solution!

The only way for these corrupt, greedy and shortsighted companies to go away is to stay principled; not buying or playing their games.

 

Not at all, in the latest cluf version it is writen that steam can't share without your consent. Steam have been sued and lost about this point few years ago.
On counterpart epic ask to the user about sharing steam info with them and the button is unchecked (mean NO) by default.
It's like Amazon with Twich, to have purple skin in game, people are ready to share their info and get prime... And after they complain about their data leaking.

Most company are not fair, but if user are st**** enough to play their plan...

 

I am amazed this thread didn't turn into "Burn the Epic Witch" kind of thread.

pats self on shoulder.

 

pats hedgehog's spikey shoulder

 

As you said, you're talking about something from several years ago, because Steam is still making data public, which I don't think they would do if they didn't have a way to do this without getting sued again. Like I said before, their TOS basically says they can do this (which you have to agree to to use their service). That being said, I'm not sure what Valve wrote for the TOS and privacy agreement back then, but, if they didn't specify what data was to be publicized, then they deserved to get sued for it.
Today, I'm very confident they're not doing anything illegal.

 

Indeed. I am very surprised that someone would make such a statement. People seem to forget that taking a principled stance comes with sacrifices - for us gamers, that means not being able to play the games in question. Pirating because you refuse to sacrifice your enjoyment makes you just as self-centered and greedy as those who you are fighting against and undoes your principled stance (after all, what are the principles of a thief?). The only valid options are: 1) you refuse to buy or play the games on principle or 2) you bite the bullet and buy through the EGS. Pirating is never a valid option.

I think there was plenty of that, it's just that there were other factors to consider as well. Epic reading files that they should not have is certainly an issue, but Steam should have done more to protect this data - leaving it unencrypted means that any third party app could have access to it.

In the end, I'm glad this came up, as it showed improper behavior on Epic's part and lax security on Valve's part - and hopefully both will be addressed soon.

 

nobody is blameless here, & both parties are at fault. epic is not about to hardcode an official API call to their biggest competitor in order to integrate importing a friends list, but if anyone thinks this is really about that, all im going to say is...thats sadly naive. tencent is proven on record spying on its customers in china, & they have plenty of raw incentive to scrape info on american & european customers through epic now - to sell to advertisers, for research, or other ends.

steam servers have so many holes its not even funny. API calls can retrieve tons of supposedly private information without any major exploits being leveraged, no penetration necessary. valve is too busy hiring mobile app-style web designers to code their ghastly new chat interface...to detect, much less patch, these vulnerabilities.

its squarely the fault of their lateral office structure - nobody is interested in bug hunting or plugging exploits (hey, its hard)...so they just, uh, dont do it. because nobody is making them.

i wish this was the case. integration can be accommodated for with simple oauth style validation, yeah, but even without a token its easy to scrape publicly accessible info stored on their servers, & plenty of it isnt public-facing. with a token? you can access almost anything you can think of related to steam. you shouldnt be able to. the token doesnt even have to match the authorization tier, ie info a friend could access, info the account owner can access, etc.

 

I remember driving to the store, buying a box with a CD (or floppies inside), taking it home, installing it and playing your game.

Now? steam, uplay, origin, epic... Click. Click. Click. Done. This is easier.

Better? I'm going to go with "no".

 

I missed this message, let me clear some air.

Yes, I meant Steam should encrypt its files where information such as SteamId is stored. All Epic wants is your SteamId, as it gets it, unless Steam profile is private, all information about you is available on steam community.

Here's my account btw. I am surprised Steam finally blocked access to my steam library. So you can't now what games available now on my account. Yet, since my profile is public, you can see all my friends.
https://steamdb.info/calculator/76561197989600099/?cc=us

Perhaps Epic still can access it on my local drive. Since it can sniff the games I have installed in steam folder. It's ok, can't be helped. What can be helped though, is not storing my SteamId in plain text file. Or at least encrypt it, so other software doesn't know WHOS games it is, making the info useless.

As weird it might sound, software should care about its privacy on your local drive. Yes, I know malware can take control of your mouse, launch steam and copy paste your info.
But it shouldn't be there in plain text file. If Epic want to become a malware, take control of your mouse to steal your info, it's up to OS nd antivirus to take care of it.

 

It will be interesting to see if the EU/UK take up this breach of EU/UK consumers privacy laws, Epic just might find themselves on course for a hefty fine, but they might get a reduction due to owning up quickly. Lol