#53
Post
by Some newbie driver » 16 Jun 2021 23:19
I understand to be intrusive the collection of PERSONAL data, wether main one or other kind od data that all linked together leads to a personal profile. That's what all major tech companies do (even when forbidden) with their users and what most people is tolerant/indulgent/ignorant about.
But I don't see the problem (and I even thing it's perfectly allowed) to gather plain non-personal anonymous data basic for the working and developing of the software. I'm talking about CPU type, amount and kind of RAM, amount of kind of disk, type of graphic card, Operative System model and version and not so much more. That's plain hardware/software data and very anonymous so there should be no concern about it; neither concern about the reason to gather it. If that would be illegal, the very activation of Windows would it be too (the activation ID of any Windows version is a main hardware list of the computer).
After all, Steam survey is not a "market share" report (nobody uses seriously this way because everybody knows it doesn't work), but it's a kind of data Steam presents in order for all developers of the platform to know the kind of hardware their potential customers are going to have. So the programs on Steam can fit better the capabilities of potential customers.
As I said, I'm sure they will have good reasons, just that I don't see which ones those could be. Of course, what they can't do is to gather all the data they do with the actual survey without an explicit consent of the user.
Regards
BTW, a great part of that list of very basic hardware and software is already made "public" by our browser to any website we visit that ask for it. Ans when I say ask, I don't mean that the website shows any message to the user asking for permission to do so. It works that way because it was considered it's data necessary in some cases for the web services to work correctly. The same approach is what I meant with Steam gathering that for all their users.