“Do we care what porn sites you visit? Oh, dear god, no” Valve replies following claims that it builds list of websites visitors use
A Reddit user who reverse-engineered the software game maker Valve uses to spot cheats has posted suggestions that the games maker is building a list of every website that players of its games visit.
The post on the Counter-Strike board was entitled VAC now reads all the domains you have visited and sends it back to their servers hashed, and suggested that “any query to the site (an image, a redirect link, a file on the server) will be added to the dns cache”.
However, Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve has hit back in a statement, saying that the system simply looked to see if cheat DRM servers were accessed while playing the game.
“Cheat versus trust is an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. New cheats are created all the time, detected, banned, and tweaked. This specific VAC test for this specific round of cheats was effective for 13 days, which is fairly typical. It is now no longer active as the cheat providers have worked around it by manipulating the DNS cache of their customers' client machines,” he explained.
“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.
“Our response is to make it clear what we were actually doing and why with enough transparency that people can make their own judgements as to whether or not we are trustworthy,” he added.
Newell said that ‘thousands’ of cheats would be created for a game such as Counter-Strike, but stressed “Do we care what porn sites you visit? Oh, dear god, no. My brain just melted.”