I’m at a point where I’d like to play certain games, but I dislike that they’re exclusively available on consoles and Steam for Desktop. Steam’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service raise concerns about my personal security and privacy. I’m looking for advice on how to improve my privacy while using Steam.
Thank you in advance!
(I will use Steam on Linux)
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VFIO/SR-IOV
If your goal is to play “Robin Morningwood Adventure - A Gay RPG” from the comfort of your closet without your aunt getting a notification, then you want to mark the game private.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1150-C06F-4D62-4966
Obviously, this is insufficient if you don’t want the watchful eye of Valve themselves to be upon your gaming session.
Even if this doesn’t protect me against Valve itself, this will be very useful. Thank you!
A non technical answer: Don’t interact with other players and don’t give out any personal information.
Use a unique and non-memorable username in steam and in game. Don’t use any of the social functions in steam.
It’s often overlooked that the biggest risk to personal information is the person themselves.
(Obviously you need to give some information to Steam for purchasing, and others have shown other methods to limit what information is sold about you as much as you an. It also depends where you reside - the EU has better protections than most)
I mean what exactly are you looking to get out of using steam specifically? You can use lutris to play your games, and you can acquire games through means other than steam that would be P2P and have a bit more anonymity that way. Other than that, like the other person mentioned use vpn to create an anonymous account but other than anonymity i’m not sure what you can do for privacy on steam.
I actually never heard of Lutris before, could you please provide me some links, etc. so I can get into it?
I don’t really know what you mean by “other means”, let’s say Hogwarts Legacy for example. How could I acquire it otherwise, besides buying it for a console?
Alright.
where to get games:
this will not probably work for most multiplayer games or always-online games like Genshin Impact
Lutris is a FOSS game launcher for GNU+Linux that handles installing from different (open-API) sources like GOG or itch.io or just a local installer file. It also manages wine/proton versions, settings and prefixes for each game. It also integrates with a lot of emulators for old consoles like 3DS, PSP or Atari.
Depends on whether piracy is less of an ethical issue than supporting a sexist transphobe.
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I don’t know of a guide but I’d suggest making a new anonymous account (email and privacy card) but make sure it’s created while using a VPN (for that initial IP log) and then continue to use it on a VPN (don’t forget DNS in general too). Then be sure to be on Linux and use the Flatpak as it’s a sandboxed application. I read a thread about viruses in a Proton environment and how they can still access other parts of your system so there may be a weak point in the sandbox with Proton, but I’m no expert and have little knowledge on the subject.