Privacy and Gaming

This has been a topic that's been interesting me lately.

I've been a long time listener and lurker of Giant Bomb and the Giant Bombcast for quite a while. It's been odd listening to their views on technology and how it progressed for quite a while (especially with how Will Smith gets excited over proprietary tech). I have been exclusively a GNU/Linux user (outside of a few VMs [ReactOS, FreeBSD, etc]) for 10+ years, so I figured I was just a bit too disconnected from their mindsets and had different priorities. Still, I listened to them as I am into video games and the people are hilarious. Not to mention I respect a lot of their opinions on games I might potentially want to play.

The past couple of years have shown that maybe their mindsets aren't as distant as I thought they were. Privacy and security has come up more often lately and it just seemed like they begrudgingly accepted the reality of it. With the popularity of Discord and Steam, I figured most gamers just dismissed any privacy concerns in favor of convenience (especially with people being okay with the people behind Discord).

I generally have my own rule I follow for technology: I don't trust anything that doesn't trust me. If something is closed-source, I'm going to run it sandboxed via firejail with the --net=none argument. If it requires an internet connection, then I'm not going to buy it or use it. That rule also applies to video games. So no Steam, Discord, or even modern Actiblizzion games. All my games anymore come from GOG and Humble. Even then, if the game is closed-sourced, I keep it firejailed and it can't access the network for LAN or online gaming. So I play a lot of single-player games.

How do you feel about privacy, security, and gaming? What do you do to protect your rights while still being able to enjoy modern gaming? I'm just interested in the gaming side of it, not technology in general as that can be a whole separate discussion with all the smart devices floating around and Intel running Minix on everyone's ME. I'm also not interested in any measuring contests or anything like that, I'm simply curious and would be interested in reading other people's thoughts and opinions.

Download the world and enjoy while you can.

I understand the want for privacy. But if you want pure privacy you need to move to into a remote cave with no electricity. I'm not saying it's unjustified, but you seem to actively crippling your life. How do you browse the internet? send an email? offsite back up? online banking?

I like to play pretty much anything I can really get my hands on, which means that I have a Steam account, Origin, UPlay, GOG, Epic, etc. I use them quite a bit.

I guess this means I'm not particularly bothered by privacy concerns. The vast majority of the time, all of the data being gathered on "me" is being gathered by a computer that is also gathering information for millions of other people at the same time and sorting it into algorithms and databases and such that exist to figure out what advertising they want to shoot my way. Which sucks, but also, I'm pretty good at filtering out all of that targeted advertising and just looking up whatever I want to look up.

There isn't a human in a cubicle looking up information on me specifically and thinking "oooh, I should write down all of this guy's information just incase!"

But that's just me personally. I am aware that these same methods can be used for more than mere advertising if a company or, say, the government wants to push an agenda or marginalize certain views.

I don't really give a shit about any of it. My datas out there, try and make something useful out of my boring ass life I guess.

The world is going a certain way and I'm not interested enough to fight the current. At least not for games.

Tor Browser has been my default for a while. Email with PGP (enigmail) and TorBirdy under Thunderbird is pretty easy to set up. I make sure anything internet facing is wrapped up nicely in Firejail. As for offsite backup, NextCloud is pretty nice. I don't do any online banking.

Hey, more power to you. You'll enjoy games I'll never touch. I'm not really worried about what someone might do with the information. It's more of the idea of it that just bothers me. If I was full-on RMS, I probably wouldn't even be on this site. I just think rights to privacy are worth protecting as I don't really want to see a world where the right isn't available. I like Snowden's analogy comparing it to free speech.

I don't blame people that choose not to concern themselves with it. Doom 2016 looked damn fun and I don't think anyone is suffering or feels violated for using Steam and probably never will.

I take what I consider to be reasonable precautions when it comes to password security, hosted backups, and the like. Nothing I care about is stored outside my local network without heavy encryption, for example.

But when my paranoia reaches a level that it's having a significant impact on my time and enjoyment, I let it go. No online banking? Oof.

With these concerns, you might be better off using a console for your average AAA game. Those things only take whatever information you put into them, so if you use a separate email address and don't put anything else in for your online account, you wouldn't have to worry about anyone tracking anything about you other than what games you're playing. That way, you could play a lot of the stuff you're missing out on without worrying about programs gathering information on you.

You also sound like a fellow who knows his way around a computer, so I'd be willing to bet that you're used to a mouse and keyboard, higher framerates, and video/graphics options, so controllers, low framerates, and limited-at-best graphics options might not be OK with you.

Another thing you could do is feed a Steam account limited information and only use a Windows partition for gaming. You don't even have to put your card information in, you can buy Steam cards in stores so Steam never gets your bank information. Once again, the only thing they're tracking about you is what games you're playing. I don't think that most or any games are spying on other files, but even if they are, what are they going to read if everything is on your Linux partition/drive/whatever? The only way they can do that is if they detect that you have an EXT4 partition and are able to read what's on it from the NTFS partition that Windows would be running on. Steam won't have your bank information because you're exclusively buying Steam cards from stores, they won't have your personal email address because you've come up with a separate one exclusively for Steam (or other gaming platforms), and they won't have your address or anything if you feed them a different address. You'd have to give them your phone number if you want to set up 2Factor authentication, though, that would be a problem.

As I said, I don't personally go to any of these lengths, I just started thinking about how I, personally, would go about things if securing privacy was really one of my primary concerns.

Out of curiosity - what makes you think that GOG is any better than Steam when it comes to privacy?

@justin258: Nah, I'm not really a fan of closed hardware. I did play around with console modding when I was young, but that's just more work than I'm willing to put into it anymore. I'm not too worried about being tracked online. Hell, I'm using my real name here. I'm just not really a fan of something trying to scrape information on my PCs or LAN without asking me first. Debian has analytics, but it asks if I want to opt-in first and I'm fine with that.

It's not that I have anything to really hide, I don't really care who has what on me. It's more of I don't want to support those business practices. The only way I'd be willing to touch Windows outside of work is if they open-sourced it. For now, WINE and ReactOS are the closest things I really touch. Yeah, I miss out on a lot of games, but in the end there's still plenty of other games for me to enjoy.

I like GOG as it doesn't require a proprietary client to download the games, I can just download them through my browser. Since they're DRM-free, I can just sandbox them with firejail with the "--net=none" argument. No privacy concerns there beyond what I have to give GOG to sign up and buy games. I'm the same way with Humble's DRM-free games and Itch.io.

Steam I have so many mixed feelings on. On one hand, I don't want to support DRM and requirement for a proprietary client, but on the other they've don't a lot of gaming on GNU/Linux. I'll praise them for the good they've done, but I still won't use their platform.

So why isn't privacy that much of a concern to you? What are your priorities with gaming technology and where would you like to see it go? I made this thread in hopes of sparking an interesting discussion with diverse opinions and thoughts. It's been pretty flat so far. That's probably my fault, though. I'm not the greatest at writing outside of Python, C, and Bash.

You should check out RMS if you want paranoia. The guy's smart, but it'd be stressful to live like him. As for me, my setup hasn't really changed that much since I switched over to GNU/Linux distributions (which was back when Vista came out). When I started looking at privacy more, all I really did was just uninstall my closed-source packages and started using Tor Browser instead of Firefox. It really wasn't a big change for me, so I just figured why not?

I've never really supported any form of online-DRM. I never really got into social media or online banking, and that was before I started thinking more about privacy. I guess it's just one of those things where you don't know what you're missing until you experience it.

Considering I mostly pay using a card rather than cash, I have a cellphone and I am active on multiple social media sites I would guess I signed away my identity and habits to the powers that be a long time ago. And when it comes to games I am even less concerned with whatever information they may or may not have. I think it boils down to what I consider privacy and what I can live with not being private. And at some point, what would I gain from jumping through hoops to be more 'secure' and 'private'?

Don't get me wrong, I don't subscribe to the "I have nothing to hide so I have nothing against them watching"-line of thinking. But I also don't necessarily have the drive or interest to stand on digital barricades and plant some flag. But I suppose that's a common problem with me and issues in society, I see the problem but I just don't really have the time or energy to really be a part of the solution.

I wish I could say I was different, but right or wrong, I feel almost exactly the same.

@adamstambaugh:

So why isn't privacy that much of a concern to you? What are your priorities with gaming technology and where would you like to see it go? I made this thread in hopes of sparking an interesting discussion with diverse opinions and thoughts.

Convenience, I guess. I gain a whole hell of a lot by participating in Steam, Origin, Uplay, and Microsoft's gaming services. If I were to give all of that up in the name of privacy, I'd be losing a whole lot and gaining some peace of mind about online privacy. But also, if you've ever done anything on the internet before, you don't have much privacy anyway, so really I wouldn't be gaining much at all.

It's worth noting that privacy isn't a complete non-concern to me - I have a Ubuntu partition that I used to use quite a bit. But lately my computer has been used for video games and Youtube and it's not worth jumping into an entirely different operating system just to watch Youtube videos. For a while there, my plan was to buy from GOG whenever possible, but that was more because DRM sucks and some part of me worries about what will happen if Steam ever bites the dust.

In an ideal world, everything would be delivered in a GOG-esque manner. I buy it, download it, and I don't have to worry about DRM or about a service going down preventing me from my single player games or the rumors of Denuvo thrashing SSD's. In an even more ideal world, I could skip online purchasing altogether and buy old-fashioned big-box PC games and never have to worry about losing access to games. But that's never going to happen, unfortunately.

When it comes to gaming technology, I spend more time pondering preservation of games rather than privacy of online services. Video games are the newest form of art and no form of art is worth anything if you cannot go back and experience parts of its history, so I think about how we can preserve that a fair bit. About the best we have right now are illegal compilations of ROMS and emulators when it comes to old console games. For old PC ("PC" being a catch-all term here), there's GOG and abandonware sites and such as well as DOSbox. But this is all off-topic.

That's probably my fault, though. I'm not the greatest at writing outside of Python, C, and Bash.

No, your writing is fine. It's clear and concise and neat. The Giantbomb forums are just less populated than they used to be. These boards aren't dead, but they're not really lively either.

A little bit off-topic - I'm curious to know what you've been playing if you stick to open source operating systems and GOG/itch.io/other DRM-free services.

@pezen: I wouldn't say I'm trying to be part of a solution. I doubt many people will be interested what some bumbling Linux nerd thinks. I do subscribe to the idea of voting with my wallet, though. If history is anything to go by, I think most issues in society will eventually sort themselves out, with or without me. I just like knowing I have control over my stuff.

@justin258: On the gaming front, DRM-free is definitely a bigger concern to me than privacy. Though, I think that kind of goes hand-in-hand. While DRM-free games may report analytics, it's pretty easy to cut that off. Games that have any form of online or client dependent DRM are going to be a lot harder to block analytics.

Yeah, with the popularity of social media, forums tend to be pretty dead anymore. I only recently decided to start moving on from IRC, XMPP, and some obscure forums. Now I have a Mastodon, Twitter, and Matrix account. They're very fancy.

As for the games I play, I'm a sucker for a good Metroidvania. The main games I've played this past year are Hollow Knight, Iconoclasts, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, Hyper Light Drifter, Crossing Souls, Cuphead, Night in the Woods, Pyre, and Deltarune. Those are off the top of my head, there could be more. I don't really want to go sifting through all my games. I also tend to revisit Jamestown, Assault Android Cactus, Broforce, Lethal League, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, and Xonotic whenever we want some multiplayer shenanigans. The open-source games I'll play online or over LAN, otherwise we play them on one of my HTPCs for some couch gaming.

Preservation of games is rough. A lot of companies don't seem to even care about their own history unless they can make a profit off of it. That is definitely a worthwhile thing to pursue. I wonder how many games have been completely lost to time due to dependence on services that aren't around anymore. Especially with systems like the satellaview.