Gabe Newell assures Steam users that Valve doesn’t track your browser history

Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell has responded to claims that Steam’s Valve Anti-Cheat 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.

Steam’s anti-cheat solution, Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC), is not relaying users’ browsing history back to Valve, co-founder Gabe Newell said via Reddit. VAC helps identify when cheats are installed and bans users from playing on VAC-secured servers; games include Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Team Fortress 2 and more. Concerns arose after a post appeared on Reddit claiming that VAC reads every DNS cache entry and reports it back to Valve’s servers. According to Newell, cheat developers create DRM and anti-cheat codes to ensure payment. “These cheats phone home to a DRM server that confirms that a cheater has actually paid to use the cheat,” Newell wrote. “VAC checked for the presence of these cheats. If they were detected VAC then checked to see which cheat DRM server was being contacted.