how does google and reddit always know what steam game i'm playing?

[Icedfate]

every time i play a new game on steam, i get search recommendations of google, video recommendations on youtube and notifications from subreddits all associated with whatever game i'm currently playing on steam.

yet, valve claims it doesn't sell my info to google.

[xBCxRangers]

I know GoG got my info lol. I bought a few games a couple weeks ago, and now i get the advertisements.

And at my age, i shouldn't be getting Army Recruiting and Military Recruiting spam. That can only have happened with Arma 3 i bought here.

[Chompman]

Google can track your purchases in many ways if you use any of their services such as your email confirmations with their email or browsers.

Steam also used to use google analytics until less then a year ago.

Also the game companies themselves can easily share the data with google as they sell such data often too.

[Kargor]

Since I'm not getting such information, there must be a way for Google to connect your google account with your Steam activity. I don't use GMail or Chrome -- these would be my prime candidates when looking for the leak.

[Icedfate]

but it's not recent purchases. . like if i start playing a game i bought years ago, google always knows what i'm currently playing

[Icedfate]

unless maybe they know because i looked something up on the wiki or something. . i dunno.

[❤ Sly Succubus ❤]

Technology does not require it to be sold for it to know. If you got a microsoft account, you'll be given images on Bing of interest despite never searching the term, this is the result of what you watched on Youtube which Bing has no association with to start with.

Technology has reached a point that Steam nor Valve need to directly involve themselves with anything for Google or Bing/Microsoft to basically use their ad-sense on anyone, been like that for a while tbf, it was barely noticable at first but has become more apparently.

Seriously if you want to test this: Go onto Youtube, after clearing your browser off, search up 2 videos, you won't need to watch them, go to bing and go to images, you'll be given imagines related to what you just watched as if ad-sense was speaking with other place all along.

That and cookies, cookies are basically the main data packet for everything

[Icedfate]

example : i bought bloodstained ritual of the night years ago and haven't touched it in years. i have 250 hours on it but i just started playing it again last night.
earlier today, i looked up the entry for the shovel armor on the wiki and now suddenly , google knows.

so maybe that's how it knows. . .

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by Icedfate:

every time i play a new game on steam, i get search recommendations of google, video recommendations on youtube and notifications from subreddits all associated with whatever game i'm currently playing on steam.

yet, valve claims it doesn't sell my info to google.

Cookies. Both in Steam for YT videos and in your regular browser.

For Steam... https://store.steampowered.com/account/cookiepreferences

Originally posted by Icedfate:

example : i bought bloodstained ritual of the night years ago and haven't touched it in years. i have 250 hours on it but i just started playing it again last night.
earlier today, i looked up the entry for the shovel armor on the wiki and now suddenly , google knows.

so maybe that's how it knows. . .

You looked it up in a browser, yes.

Cookies follow you if you don't turn them off in your preferred browser settings.

You should also turn of video history in YT in your YT account. Navigate to history in your left hand menu in YT, click on it, on the right column, click on Manage All History and turn off history. You can also turn on auto delete there too.

[Wasted]

Cookies and trackers is all ther is to it.

[g0x79]

In the past you could use on windows 7 older version on CCleaner to delete all browser trash ,but now its useless on 10 and 11 + Firewall blocks and other things ,
They abandoned best windows ever made for a "REASON" ...
: |

[g0x79]

Originally posted by PaulKrawitz:

Meanwhile me not even having a Google account at all and not using YouTube or Reddit.

If you dont using Linux , you're in the same boat with us because windows and google are partners .
Also Steam working in Chromium engine .

[Doctor Zalgo]

Originally posted by g0x79:

In the past you could use on windows 7 older version on CCleaner to delete all browser trash ,but now its useless on 10 and 11 + Firewall blocks and other things ,
They abandoned best windows ever made for a "REASON" ...
: |

Yes, the security architecture was complete ass.

Also, you could just use another browser or run a WSL container and use a browser under linux. if you really think there's something going on there. It's complete nonsense and you don't understand what a firewall is or how it works, but its all there if you want to do that.

The bottom line is that its in the US governments interests for American corporations to have a secure OS that is resilient. They fund the NSA to go over the windows source code with a microscope for two reasons.

1. to force MS to fix all the obvious and easily found hacks to prevent its American corporations from being hacked.
2. to find all the really super obscure ♥♥♥♥ that will be almost impossible to find any other way for the other side of the business (these eventually become publicly known as 0-days).

Microsoft makes a staggering amount of money selling Windows services and ongoing support to corporations, they're not going to put that at risk for a shady secondary line of business that the Government would ♥♥♥♥ them in the ass for when caught. And they'd be caught almost immediately.

[Wasted]

Originally posted by g0x79:

In the past you could use on windows 7 older version on CCleaner to delete all browser trash ,but now its useless on 10 and 11 + Firewall blocks and other things ,
They abandoned best windows ever made for a "REASON" ...
: |

Remember the time when CCleaner itself got infected with malware? Good times

[Kryzz]

from what i understand, even if you use a vpn and accept minimal cookies, have a strong firewall, have good security settings in place etc, your browser has to give certain information about several environmental factors to a website when it connects and often this combination of info can end up as a unique or nearly unique identifier which can then be used to track you across the web where sites use trackers from the same corporations e.g.: google, who happily sell your info, so when you do a search or post a chat message on a web-based chat service like discord etc, info will be automatically harvested from that such as product names etc, and you'll soon find yourself the target of advertisements as those companies aim to make money off you.
i remember seeing that firefox has, or used to have, some file in the profile folder that said a lot about your interests based on what you were searching or clicking on, and ranked that info too, which gave me a pretty good idea of what sort of info i expect the likes of google to see.
the only solace you can take is that there are so many people using the internet that they probably don't care about invading your privacy personally, and probably only care about passively harvesting money from people's wallets. in theory, the upside is the value of this information to potential buyers is greatly reduced as adblocker adoption increases, but that also means the sale price is reduced...
tl;dr internet scary

[Sigma957]

Use Brave instead and DELETE anything with the stink of Google from your life.