tl;dr: Watch what you put online and who you friend, especially on Steam. Once it’s on the internet, it’s there forever.
There’s a website similar to SpyPet for Discord, but for Steam. They compile all of our users’ profile pictures, name history, comments, URL history, “real name” history, our friend networks, forever, and they give us no option to opt out of it. Not even a private profile will stop it from scouring your friends’ lists, the forums, your avatars and name history. So what’s the purpose of it?
Stalking. I’m a victim of it.
And despite all of my efforts to not leave a trail leading to my new Steam account, SteamHistory enabled my stalkers to find me.
There are a number of unfortunate folks that have dedicated their time to follow me into whatever game servers I visit and spoil my day. I had deleted my old Steam account and repurchased all of my games on a new account that was privated from the start. I was very careful to not disclose any information that could lead to my identification, including using VPNs and prepaid methods to avoid leaking my real name to Steam. Despite that, my stalkers managed to attribute my new anonymous account to me, even though my profile is private and haven’t posted anything. But how? Well, they were “kind” enough to tell me how.
How did they find me? Enter SteamHistory.
The task itself would have been impossible without a massive database of Steam friend networks, but the website simplifies such an endeavor that it is basically trivial. Assume the role of a stalker for a second and that you know nothing about your victim’s new account. All you know is that they have a few friends with whom they sometimes play and their profiles are also private. What can you do? Initially, it seems like a lost cause, SteamHistory gives you a lead.
Go on their website and look up your victim’s friends. Despite that all involved profiles are private, it is unlikely that the victim’s friends would create new Steam accounts and repurchase their games. It’s more likely that they would simply private their profiles. With this knowledge, look at each friend’s friend history and find the friends that they all have in common, then eliminate all of those in this intersection that you are sure are not your victim. This process will always narrow the scope into only one last person: the target. Bingo. You’ve found your victim. And you didn’t even need any data from them. That’s how they found me.
What does SteamHistory store?
They store and put on an exhibit your embarrassing names, your immature profile pictures, for the whole world to see. Your deadname, your abusive ex’s comments, made forever available for any imaginable bad actor. They etch in stone the fact that you once were Steam friends with this guy that turned out to be a sexual predator.
So what can you do?
Nothing besides not using Steam. Or get Valve to implement better control of our privacy, but good luck with that. The owner of SteamHistory has been confronted on the matter, and what they said is that you can opt out of data collection by deleting your Steam account. They don’t care about the GDPR because they’re situated in the US.
So heads up.
Or get Valve to implement better control of our privacy
Even Valve cannot delete publicly available information from someone else’s server.
Archive.org does the same.
Yes, but they could implement better restrictions that stop third parties from scraping data like that.
Like what? If you can see it with your eyeballs, it’s trivial for a simple script to scrape the information.
Then there should be a way to restrict even eyeballs from seeing the information.
I thought private mode did that, but I guess not. Or it only restricts the information to eyeballs.
I thought private mode did that, but I guess not.
As far as I know, it does, but as I said, they can’t delete information from an archive on a server they don’t own.
How do they get the data in the archive in the first place then?
There seems to be a way for them to get friends data from steam somehow and that hole needs to be closed.
How do they get the data in the archive in the first place then?
I’m not sure what you mean. They get it from Steam. Once again, publicly available information.
that hole needs to be closed.
You can close it by making your profile private. But they’ve already archived that info.
very careful not to disclose any information to steam
proceeds to associate with everyone they were previously friends with on public logs
I just want to point out that if your friends accounts were public like you imply they wouldn’t have even needed to use the site. All the site does is automate the data collection process. The only way to fix it is to make private accounts the default.
Read the post next time.
Please enlighten me on what I missed
Despite that all involved profiles are private,
No, my point still applies. It sounds like they refriended the new account then set it to private, leaving a trail that could still be manually recorded
It’s just a profile scraper, no? I tried my own and a few of my friends profiles. They were not indexed yet and because they all have private settings you cannot see anything else besides current Display Name and current Profile Picture.
So you should tell your friends to set profile/edit/settings/privacy settings: Friend’s List -> Friend’s only. After that you create a new account and the scraper won’t be able to access their new friend list anymore.
Edit: Also why is this post written that way, I was unsure if AI generated or some attempt at a novel, or am I going crazy??
I found that it read like a fluff dramatization story from a The Guardian opinion piece, only shorter. Those are texts with a lot of words, but there’s usually very little actual substance relative to the length of the text, most is just meandering embellishments. So imo not necessarily ai, humans do write texts in this style as well.
Scary. Thanks for posting this.
Isn’t this generally how the big tech firms generate dark profiles on people? Of the people who don’t explicitly exist on their database. Take the intersection of data from family events. The people not in their database of known profiles are also likely family. Do the same for friend events. Take the intersection of those peoples interests. You’ll be knowing a lot about someone who never told you anything about themselves.
You can run but you can’t hide. Crazy times we live in.
I mean, this sucks, but I also wonder how this could be fixed. If you read up what absolutely benign stuff like your physical screen resolution coupled with how quickly you move your mouse coupled with your possible languages ad companies can use to uniquely identify you among the whole world visiting their page, it’s not a long throw at all to uniquely identify someone based on their steam friends.
Never friend anyone, just play single player games.
If you do play online games, be aware that everything can be permanently online.
Internet people are fake
interesting, only the most basic info is included about my 19 year old account. I’ve always been very conservative with the info I share online though.
back in the day, everyone was regularly reminded that the internet is a wild west and only by safeguarding your personal information and using pseudonyms and avoiding identifying info can you have a chance to be safe and have a good time. but now that PII is profitable, all the big internet companies tell you the opposite so they can make a buck. I think this is the inevitable outcome of it.
sorry to hear a baddie is clinging to you, that’s always quite troublesome. it can be hard to do anything about it. shitty as it is, your best bet is usually to become an undesirable target: boring. they’re school yard bullies. they do it for the reaction, that’s it. the more you react, the harder they try. fucking assholes.
Fun fact, the GDPR applies to entities outside the EU, if they sell to EU, or they handle EU citizen data.
So gist of this is, of they are not some random people hiding, but there’s a real company to -presumably- reap in some ad money or subscription money for their StalkerPlus product.or something, it takes a single determined EU citizen to fuck them up.
