This is true hardware fingerprinting. If what rumors are saying about Steam Deck anti-cheat is true, this is a proprietary means to uniquely identify hardware and do more fingerprinting of the hardware, then use those identifiers to either gather metadata (so basically Steam Deck with Anti Cheat is no better than Windows in terms of telemetry) and have a killswitch at the hardware level based on hardware fingerprints.
All QEMU vTPMs will be banned right from the start, since the code is open source.
This is a slippery slope that could mean Denuvo might need TPM on Windows 11, and the proprietary trap required for compatibility layers to function with Denuvo means your hardware will be fingerprinted a lot easier. This is a definite erosion to privacy that is unavoidable.
You need an account and to be signed in to steam, in order to use it.
Steam is Not shy about the telemetry it uses.
But, steam should not be used for private browsing of the general internet, nor for accessing sensitive information/websites.
Valve Makes the steam deck. They don’t need to fingerprint it; they already know the hardware
Besides, the steam client already reports back the hardware information anyway.
What steam / valve fo not do, is track your presence across the web with remote fonts and 1pixle images or any of that carry on. They don’t do deals with online stores for customer data/sales. They don’t procure medical data from hospitals/insurers.
I’m not much of a gamer and especially don’t play online multiplayer but I can see where people are stuck in that situation feeing betrayed. They can’t play the games they want to unless they comply. Most people likely don’t care which is what I’m sure the publishers count on. What disturbs me is how quickly this is moving. It will be anti-cheat or anti-pirate, but soon it will be anti-choice.
I can’t imagine this stopping at multiplayer or games in general. This affects sandboxing, cloud computing, and especially much older systems. Not everyone can afford to drop cash on a new system and if theirs can’t run Windows 11 or if they just don’t want to run an OS that supports secure boot, they’re screwed.
Yup, that’s the general consensus towards TPM 2.0.
But what’s scary is the deal with anti-cheats being compatible on Steam Deck giving third parties hardware fingerprinting access. Vanguard I hope NEVER works with Steam Deck vanilla, but Denuvo is a “industry standard” and that’s what can be scary if they follow suit.
The problem isn’t Valve, it’s the third party DRM and anti-cheats having completely different privacy policies under the rug. In making the Steam Deck, to comply with third party policies, they kinda have to do a proprietary middle ground against their original vision of a Linux centric ecosystem if they go the TPM route for anti-cheat and DRM.
When Denuvo enforces TPM, that’s gonna be a very bitter pill to swallow.
Denuvo sucks, but Steam has made no traction to use alternative DRM for day one titles.
Speaking of that, CEG will NEVER be compatible on Steam Deck within Steam and Proton. (Wine Steam with Lutris does work though) Valve is silent on CEG and the issue tracker reflects it. I’m 100% certain of this:
Well, if you can’t play their game(s), don’t buy it/them in the first place. Why spend money on something you can’t play w/o sacrificing your privacy?
For me, as non-gamer, it’s a non-issue. Sure, I understand gamers are upset, but the term “unavoidable” is totally misplaced here. Taxes and death are unavoidable, but anything gaming related, that can be avoided. Just do some tough decisionmaking
Because Steam isn’t the one that is implementing it, it’s the publisher/devs. What the steamdeck will likely do is reinforce the idea of removing denuvo after the inital sales period is over that way the game can gain continuous traction and be sold to steamdeck users afterwards.
Yeah, that’s the good part of recent Denovo-free titles that have it removed after a while.
Steam’s CEG though has had it in place without ever having it removed. This is a MAJOR problem for the 700 titles that use CEG. (Just Cause 2 being a very notable one)
Already being rather annoyed, when anti-cheats add in their performance nerfing telemetry… Now throw in a chip to be a hardware grade PING [killswitch]
It was to my understanding that Windows 11 didn’t have a capability of using VTPM. It was also to my understanding that now secure boot was mandatory anyways so what changes for the user on this They are still having hardware fingerprinting done by Microsoft? If you’re talking about privacy on the windows operating system that’s been a joke since basically the end of Windows 7. In fact one would say it’s been a joke. Because it’s a operating system that you can’t audit the code of but I digress how does this change anything for the end user who is probably already okay with TPM 2.0 and secure boot and playing their games?
I’m playing devil’s advocate here because there’s a lot of people who just don’t care there’s people who want to display their games They don’t really care if they’re hardware’s fingerprinted They have a cell phone full of social media apps like Snapchat and TikTok. I guess this targets us Linux users that game on Linux but then again we’ve never really been a particularly big part in market. That in 90% of the time we’re quite hypocritical so really not sure how I could really feel about this overall
The Steam Deck anti-cheat situation will dictate whether the freedom afforded by Linux basically erodes when concessions for this kind of proprietary tracking is officially allowed, like when EME was accepted as a web standard… A closed standard within a ocean of open standards.
I think most companies have always chosen their closed standard
My real point comes in that if you do like gaming and this is just something you like doing then you already walk a line where you’re running non-free software and not always choosing open solutions. So my question to those folk is what’s the fuss
Now on the flip side let me rear my fangs a bit. If you are a person who prefers open standards then gaming isn’t for you and it’s never been. The person that prefers open standards probably wouldn’t even run Ubuntu or Fedora. And they would go to more extremes and I think we can all know what those are.
I guess the way I see this is the BSD versus GPL2 argument at this point. It’s very very similar. I agree it’s unfortunate that this is occurring but it’s nothing new. It’s just our current argument of the time. And you piece of hardware came out that gives us the capability of making a unique fingerprint. It’s no surprise that the powers that be that had already been doing this stuff were like hey this is kind of cool let’s use it.
You see what I’m kind of getting at. there’s going to be many camps in this but I think the camp that gets bothered by it maybe should just not buy games They shouldn’t buy the steam deck.
As long as the customer has that decision before forking over the money. My fuss is 2 fold. I think this is the top of a slippery slope. Also I don’t think you should be limited by your hardware to play a game. We aren’t accessing classified documents or critical infrastructure. It’s just a game.
Will I buy the aforementioned games? Not likely. But if this crap started showing up in games I do want to play, I would be pretty upset too.
Just throwing out there that if games can require this nonsense, then it’s only a matter of time before every other commercial programsubscription is going to jump on the bandwagon as well.
