Of course it is. They haven't changed anything. You can find Epic's response in this thread (basically amounts to "no, you guys, it's not as bad as you think so we have no reason to stop it").
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Developing: Epic Games Launcher appears to collect your steam friends & play history (Up2: Valve responds, See Threadmarks)
- Thread starter Madjoki
- Start date
Of course it is. They haven't changed anything. You can find Epic's response in this thread (basically amounts to "no, you guys, it's not as bad as you think so we have no reason to stop it").
Fuck. Guess I'll wait for the outer worlds to be in sale after a year.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...-to-fix-game-launcher-after-privacy-concerns/
Still doesn't explain why their data scarping throws such wide net and they decided to ignore Steam API because secure concerns, but totally trust Steam API to be secure? Okay?
I wouldn't trust anything Sweeney says. Dude has proven countless times he is a fucking liar.
Why he would on record lie that they made deliberate choice not to utilize Steam API and go digging around Steam data with their own code? That would be absolutely stupid lie to make and...well.. doing it like they did is also immensely stupid.
In that article Valve also condemns this action taken by Epic and says no 3rd party software has any right to access that data like Epic does.
Edit: I wish some more better known gaming outlets covered this, because holy shit...
I'm more concerned about the fact that as far as I'm aware, they didn't suffer any repercussions for knowingly doing this, and a vast majority of the people I'm seeing discussing this are blaming Valve for putting that data there in the first place.
Well, Sweeney has proven he will do anything to get what he wants. Of course, he could also be telling the truth and it was all an accident on his part.
Like you said, wish this was covered more. I really want to know if this was done with the intent of spying EGS users.
I think that because major outlets literally refuse to cover any of this it has resulted e.g. EU body not to learn about this. What kind data EGS is scraping without proper notification or approval of user could be GDPR violation by itself, especially now that Valve has straight said that they view user data within their client installation to be private user data.
Could Valve get into some hot water too? Maybe, but same time we could soon see Valve starting to ecrypt a lots of data Steam handles because of what Epic has been doing.
I don't understand the complaints about some of the stuff Epic has done (courting exclusives) but this is definitely something I find concerning. I saw Epic's response and glad this was brought to light.
They knew what they were doing, they did it and knew what all kinds of data they are scraping from Steam without using intended API. Just because and without intention to stop.
Then they got caught and are promising to fix it.
Sweeney even says that and it just makes it worse, "Since this issue came to the forefront we're going to fix it."
Oh cool. So I don't have to worry too much of it going through other files.
Any way to block the tracking since it's a desktop web app? Don't think there's a desktop adblock
You could theoretically run all your desktop traffic through a local proxy and drop anything going to certain domains you specify but there will likely be a performance hit to your regular internet traffic.
There's a lot of tracking in Windows 10 ("telemetry" and others) as well. It's a pandora's box if you want to go down that route.
