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Steam Spy Announces It's Shutting Down, Blames Valve's New Privacy Settings
Steam Spy, the world's most comprehensive game ownership and play estimator available to the public, announced that it "won't be able to operate anymore" thanks to recent changes to Valve's privacy policy. "Valve just made a change to their privacy settings, making games owned by Steam users hidden by default," the site's operators announced on its official Twitter account. "Steam Spy relied on this information being visible by default." The creator of the website, Sergey Galyonkin, suggested that the site will only remain as an "archive" from here on out. Ars Technica reports: Indeed, Steam's new private-by-default setting is the kind of proactive, data-protective move that sites like Facebook have faced repeated scrutiny about over the past decade. However, as of press time, we could not confirm exactly how these updated settings will work, thanks to the service's "edit privacy settings" page currently appearing blank. (This can be found in the Steam interface by selecting the word "profile" under the menu that appears when mousing over your username.)
Valve pointed out that Steam will also receive a long, long, long-awaited "invisible" function for Steam's online-status toggle, which will allow players to actively communicate with Steam friends while hiding from the general public, and that it will also specifically let players hide both game ownership and gameplay time counts from friends. The company explained that Tuesday's changes came "directly from user feedback," which Steam Spy founder Sergey Galyonkin questioned via his site's Twitter feed: "They said it was by users feedback which makes me as a person born in the Soviet Union very suspicious :)" After Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney applauded Valve's privacy-minded policy change, Galyonkin responded with his own opinion on why so much data was open on Steam in the first place: "This was always a compromise between being able to play with other people and privacy," he wrote in response. "It seems they moved towards privacy now."
Valve pointed out that Steam will also receive a long, long, long-awaited "invisible" function for Steam's online-status toggle, which will allow players to actively communicate with Steam friends while hiding from the general public, and that it will also specifically let players hide both game ownership and gameplay time counts from friends. The company explained that Tuesday's changes came "directly from user feedback," which Steam Spy founder Sergey Galyonkin questioned via his site's Twitter feed: "They said it was by users feedback which makes me as a person born in the Soviet Union very suspicious :)" After Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney applauded Valve's privacy-minded policy change, Galyonkin responded with his own opinion on why so much data was open on Steam in the first place: "This was always a compromise between being able to play with other people and privacy," he wrote in response. "It seems they moved towards privacy now."
Of course it has nothing to do with the current facebook fiasco that Valve decided to be more open to these requests that must have existed since the very day the launched Steam.
I remember quite a bit of pushback from people concerned with privacy and DRM proliferation in the early 2000's, who rejected Steam and all the other platforms after it for a long time. But in the end most of them caved in due to Steam's popularity. I'm one of them. And still I try to get the few games that I play in these times on alternatives like GOG if possible.
It's not only a good idea, in the EU it will be law then the GDPR goes into effect in May. If Valve did not make changes, they'd be liable for some pretty hefty fines for violating the regulation. They couldn't even just hide some legalese blurb way down in an EULA, when it comes to personal data it must be opt-in (and the opt-in must be a user action; a pre-checked consent checkbox is not sufficient), and information must be written in "clear and plain language".
Having a website with "spy" in the name that is explicitly exists to expose data about users... yeah perhaps that's not going to fly anymore.
So, except for some vague data leech company losing out on income, how is this possibly a bad thing?
It's utterly counterintuitive to think that Steam users would not want a complete inventory of what they owned and how much they played it available to all of their friends (nothing like advertising to your CS:GO friends that you've played Hentai Strip Poker 3 for 120 hours).
And surely everyone wants the entire Steam community to know that they're online playing Steam games.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
How many thousands of hours I have in games like Fallout 4 without getting "you beat the game!" achievements?
What I don't get is why Steam Spy is shutting down. I hopped on over to TrueSteamAchievements.com and sure enough they have a tutorial on how to put your settings back:
https://i.imgur.com/2jCQeVC.pn...
With all the sudden outrage over "data" ?
What is your real life name? How much do you make? Do you have a side thing going on every Thursday that your spouse doesn't know about?
You would be outraged if I knew these things about you, and rightfully so. It is called privacy, and it is crucial for social cohesion. Right now we have privacy by obscurity, the data is largely there but unless you unlucky to land in the spotlight it won't be looked at. However, this could easily change, as latest FB scandal showed us.
Yes, IF Valve's decision was to comply to the new EU regulation then they missed that particular point either on purpose or by mistake. Maybe they did it for other reasons. Maybe people with EU based IPs will get a different treatment once that regulation goes into effect. We'll have to wait and see unless someone wants to ask them.
(I work in game industry, completely unrelated to Valve.) reading the comments so far, it seems there's quite a lot of misunderstanding or misinterpretation what happened here. spoiler alert: it's about user privacy, but not exactly the sharing-with-others-for-commercial-purposes kind.
SteamSpy is a valuable resource to learn what the real popularity of a game is like, because it draws on (previously) open Steam APIs to estimate how many people do actually own the game, and how much it is being played. it is valuable because it allows one to get a good estimation on existing market size of a particular game genre segment. now, there are two parties who don't like this kind of transparency.
first, there are publishers who would very much love to hide lackluster performance of these titles, and keep the hype that "everyone is playing this HOT!! new title" in media through paid articles and ads. naturally SteamSpy breaks this kind of false narrative.
second, as a few folks correctly mentioned here, Steam's profile/friend system makes too many things public by default, and users ARE unhappy about it - since there is still a lot of stigma around playing computer games, and also sometimes you simply don't want to broadcast the fact that you're playing something to the world, or just want to be left alone. Steam friends feature is rather dated, as it was built with sharing and playing games together with your friends in mind, mostly for teenagers in 00s, so it offers relatively few ways to regulate what you want to make public and what you do not. in part, the information that you made available publicly is also available via Steam APIs, which allowed services such as SteamSpy to exist, although that wasn't really its original purpose.
so Steam is actually doing a good thing for its users by tightening up privacy controls, and restricting ways to access someone's status both inside the system and in the APIs. incidentally, this kills services such as SteamSpy, and also inadvertently helps game publishers to hide real numbers related to their titles' performance. oh well.
I think you grossly understating your second point. It isn't solely about stigma of playing games or even playing specific game. It is about producing more data that could be aggregated to create very precise profiles. As Cambridge Analytica showed us, you can scrape a lot of data from multiple sources and then produce a devastatingly effective spear-phising like manipulation. This is what highly undesirable outcome of leaking everyone's data.
Additionally, post gamergate every gamer should be cautious about privacy. We largely beat "moral police" back, but they will inevitably come back for the round 2. You have seen their methods - they dox, they try to get people fired, they use social media lynch mobs. I don't think it is that far-fetched to see these people producing public lists of "communist sympathizers" based on people playing specific title they disapprove of.
Depends on what information we are talking about.
In the beginning you could just not create a Steam community profile. This option was hiding all information except game play time and achievements, which was visible to your friends regardless. This is still true. You'll have to create a Steam profile and set either game details and or playtime to private if you don't want the people on your friendlist to be able to see it.
In the current system your profile information is set to public, like it was before. This information includes your friend list, badges, Steam level, comments and group memberships in addition to customizations that you've made. You have to set this to private or friends only if you don't want to share it with just anyone. Doing so changes all the following settings accordingly.
A child setting of this is game details - which includes what games you own, your wishlist, achievements, playtime and what you are currently playing are set to Friends Only. Before the change this setting did not exist at all and was set by the parent 'profile'. And now there's also a sub setting for this that allows you to keep your total playtime hidden regardless of the parent setting. Since your profile was initially set to public and also published your game details, I suppose Steam Spy used this to collect data. So I suppose this particular part is no longer possible unless you've got their bot on your friend list.
All please read about GDPR : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and the official site https://www.eugdpr.org/
Both if you ARE living in the EU and if you are not. Because this will come up a LOT in future /. discussions.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Steam publishing aggregate information would not be an issue from a GDPR perspective, as long as the source data is compliant (e.g. that it's collected because it is necessary for providing the service, and that the user has given consent).
Steam doesn't, though, so this effectively means the end of the type of information SteamSpy provides.