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Report: Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) Scans Your DNS History
dotarray writes "If a recent report is to be believed, Valve is looking at your browsing history. Reportedly, the company's Valve Anti Cheat system (VAC) looks at all the domains you have visited, and if it finds that you've frequented hack sites, you'll be banned. 'The new functionality has been slammed by gamers, who claim it is "more like spyware than anti-cheat". Valve has not responded to the allegations, but all Steam users have agreed to abide by specific online conduct and not to use cheats. The company's privacy policy also explains that Valve may collect "personally identifiable information", but promises not to share it with other parties.'"
I doubt it would have any impact, Valve has a reality distortion field amongst it's fanboys that makes even Steve Jobs' look tame.
I mean, this is the company that is treated like a saint even though it ushered in the era of intrusive internet based DRM that requires them to allow you to play even your store bought game disc sometimes. That did it like a decade before evil Microsoft even considered such a thing with the XBox One before backtracking.
This is the company that was "Fox"ing game mods when it was a new thing. That was sending cease and desist letters to mods based on the previously open sourced Team Fortress 2.5 for Quake 1 source after they bought it as if they could retroactively change the license.
This is the company that can ban you arbitrarily and that has tougher restrictions on what you can do with your product than even "Worst Company in America" EA does.
This is the company that switched to regional pricing resulting in a 100% increase in price for some territories like many European nations when they did so.
This is the company who has tried to maintain a monopoly in many ways, throwing their teddy out the pram each time a competitor enters the market and starts to gain traction.
This is the company that's always had as part of it's subscriber agreement the right to take and store personally identifiable information from your system even though they have a horrendous security track record having lost their own Half-Life 2 source code through the simple measure of sending Gabe Newell an e-mail with a trojan attached to it which he idiotically executed.
Valve has always been evil, they've always been anti-privacy and anti-freedom. But they're given a pass by clueless fanboys who scream "BUT STEAM SALES OMG CHEAP GAMES!" seemingly oblivious to the fact that most Steam games are more expensive than if you just bought them from a run of the mill retailer like Amazon half the time.
Whilst there is an army of idiots willing to praise Valve, you can expect them to become even more intrusive, and even more abusive in their actions as they have consistently done so over the years. If almost any other company had done even one of the things above these same idiots that excuse Valve would be ranting "OMG, Facebook's EULA says they can store your personal data", or "OMG, Google's building a monopoly with Android", or "OMG, Microsoft is implementing phone home DRM". But because it's Steam, because it's Valve, none of that applies. Suddenly it's okay. Because cheap games.
Still, idiots get what idiots deserve.