GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rolls out today, meaning that companies need
to share with you any personally identifiable information that they’ve collected about
you.
Putting aside the spam of emails we’ve all received, and how creepy some of this information
is, it’s a big win for us.
And Valve have 2 interesting pages that you’ll want to check out.
In the video’s description.
The first is CS:GO’s.
Go to your GAMES, click on Personal Game Data and you can see all of the information they’ve
been storing about you.
They know the last time you played Arms Race was in 2016.
They know everybody you’ve ever reported, and what you’re accusing them of.
Your loadout and equipped skins.
Your pick’em predictions.
How you did in the last operation.
How few drops you got from watching majors.
Who you like to play with, your latency to locations around the world, and more.
Commendations shouldn’t come as a surprise, because if you’re like me then you’ve
tried commending a friend only to be told you’ve already done it.
But still, it comes as a bit of a surprise to see all of this information presented to
you in such a comprehensive manner.
There’s information about every match you’ve played since last October.
Which map was played, who you played with, what the scores were… and even the wait
time before the match started.
And if this sounds like something you’re really interested in knowing, you should check
out csgostats.gg which has been around for a while, allowing you to upload your matches
for an analysis.
Back to GDPR, although them knowing all this information about you can be scary, fortunately,
this is a privacy update, not a massive reveal to all, so it’s not like anybody can view
your data.
Only you.
And Valve.
There’s an anti-addiction counter.
Dota2 warns you when you’ve been online for an unhealthy amount of time, but CS:GO
does not.
But what IS this number?
Is it the amount of time you’ve unhealthily spent on CS:GO in total?
How concerned Valve is about you?
The amount of times they’ve put you in horribly 1-sided games to try and get you to stop playing?
…Nope, nothing so sinister.
It’s the amount of time CS:GO was loaded for the last time you played it.
Although since they know your match history, they might still be doing those things.
So that’s for CS:GO.
There are also pages like this for DOTA2, TF2… and even Portal 2, though that’s
not quite as comprehensive as the others.
But there’s more: you can also see your Steam account history from this page which
contains a link to pretty much EVERY BIT OF STEAM EVER MADE.
This page helped me to realise how vast the Steam platform is, and how little of it I
know of, let alone use.
Not all of this is new, but it’s good to have it all in one place and I have immediately
bookmarked this page- a lot of these pages seem difficult to find otherwise.
There’s no way I can cover all of these links in this video.
But here are a few of my favourites: You can see all stored chatlogs here with
everybody you’ve spoken to on Steam.
This only seems to record the last few conversations you’ve had with them, or if you’ve had
a long chat, only the last few dozen messages of that.
And nothing is dating back more than 2 weeks.
It’s worth checking this page out just to get a feel for how much is recorded and for
how long after it’s been said.
The mobile settings page has to be the stupidest looking part of Steam.
You can see the obscene amount that you’ve spent on your Steam profile if you want to
feel bad.
All of this dates yesterday, suggesting that this is a new page created to comply with
GDPR, so it will be interesting to see if it splits up future transactions separately.
Family Sharing lets you see who you’ve given access to your account and have since forgotten
about.
As well as the last time they abused your forgetfulness by signing in!
Don’t worry- it’s easy to revoke their access.
You can see all of the comments you’ve made on profiles dating back to 2012!
…and any outgoing emails you’ve generating dating back to 2007 for me!
A bit like with the CS:GO reports, you can see which profiles you’ve reported, as well
as the comment you accompanied the accusation with.
And hey, look at that- I got a ban without realising.
There was a spammy, scammy skin group that banned me for ‘spam’.
Awesome.
But is all this enough for Steam to comply with GDPR?
What about your Trust Factor?
Will any more information be made available to you?
And to that I say: I don’t know.
While I may be a CS:GO Youtuber, it doesn’t immediately make an expert on GDPR.
This is complicated stuff that even large companies with their own legal teams, such
as Google and Facebook, are struggling to comply with.
I’m going to ASSUME that Valve knows more about it than I do and that their privacy
policy (also linked in the description) abides by these new rules.
But it falls outside of my comfort zone to talk about with any degree of certainty.
I’ll link a few things in the video’s description, so you can see what GDPR aims
to achieve and what you’re entitled to.
Take the right to be forgotten, for example.
Although I don’t know for sure, it probably doesn’t mean you can ask Valve to delete
your match history every time you lose a game.
In Steam’s Privacy policy right now, it says that you can be forgotten…
provided you delete your Steam account.
You probably won’t want to do that.
Saying that, I’m sure that you will have valid questions about the grey-areas in GDPR
that will need clarifying.
But please, don’t come to me with these.
Hopefully somebody else more knowledgeable than myself will come along who will know
the answers.
You can see a summary of GDPR’s goals on this page, which I’ll link to in the video’s
description should you want to know more.