Claims of Anonymity of the Steam Hardware Survey

0x46.net

12 points·boreq··5 comments

I didn’t know audacity was adding tracking. The git repo says it’s opt in, but sends the data to google and yandex. They say you can avoid it by compiling from source with certain flags, which is a bit of a nuisance.

Why not set up their own telemetry server so people wouldn’t have to worry so much? If I recommend audacity to somebody, I won’t want to worry that the names of every file they edit will get sent to data companies during error reports because they clicked yes during install instead of reading the wall of text that usually says “say yes or the installer will abort”

Audacity was purchased by a company which makes money from online advertising. My guess is that they need to use Google/Yandex because they are going to track users across all of their websites/apps so that their targeting is better and they earn more money from ads. That’s just a guess, though.

Not ideal. To be honest steam doesn't really worry me in this regard. Their business model is selling me another 100 games that I'll never play, not spying on me.

Doesn't make it OK, but I do try to consider the underlying motivations of the company involved when evaluating privacy threats

As a note, the section of the Steam Hardware Survey that OP is referring to only exists in the linux version of the survey.

Yeah, I can't help but think this is probably an oversight rather than anything else - there doesn't seem to be anything personally identifiable in the macOS or Windows hardware info, and both of these are larger platforms than Linux on Steam.

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