Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell has responded to claims that Steam's Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) system reads domains users visit and sends this information back to Valve's servers.
Posting recently on Reddit, Newell briefly described the function of VAC, Steam's anti-cheat system, and addressed questions whether Valve would retain users' browsing histories. Specifically, he confirmed that Valve does not send browsing history to its servers, nor care what porn sites Steam users visit.
Speaking on the wider topic of cheating in Steam games, Newell discussed the ongoing "cheat versus trust" issue.
"There is also a social engineering side to cheating, which is to attack people's trust in the system," Newell said.
"If 'Valve is evil - look they are tracking all of the websites you visit' is an idea that gets traction, then that is to the benefit of cheaters and cheat creators. VAC is inherently a scary looking piece of software, because it is trying to be obscure, it is going after code that is trying to attack it, and it is sneaky. For most cheat developers, social engineering might be a cheaper way to attack the system than continuing the code arms race, which means that there will be more Reddit posts trying to cast VAC in a sinister light."
Newell explained in the post that kernel-level cheats are costly to create, and subsequently expensive to combat. According to Newell, Valve's goal is to make these creations "more expensive for cheaters and cheat creators than the economic benefits they can reasonably expect to gain."
When addressing the question as to whether Valve was using its success to "go evil", Newell wrote, "I don't think so, but you have to make the call if we are trustworthy. We try really hard to earn and keep your trust."
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