Battleeye - Invasive software?

[Desensitized]

Hi Guys,
I'm looking at playing Arma 3 that I just bought yesterday, but the game is trying to force me to use Battleeye anti-cheat software. I read the privacy disclosure with Battleeye and it has me very concerned about what the software is actually doing. Basically, it's asking for FAR too much access to my system than I am comfortable with.

I'm curious what other people are doing and what the general consensous is. The people who have Battleeye on their systems, are you using your system for other tasks (email, photos, documents, etc.) that are personal? I really don't like the idea of opening my system up carte blanche with only the promise that nothing personal is being looked at.

Thanks.

[Darren]

Battleeye is quite invasive but so are most anti-cheat systems.

As people are giving cheats maximum privileges to try to hide them local anti-cheat solutions need the same permissions to find them.

[Desensitized]

Thanks for the response. I"m curious what other users think of this though, and how they're handling their data. Are people using their gaming system only for gaming to prevent the chance of personal documents/data being copied or viewed?

Just opening up my entire system to some foreign developer seems like a really bad idea.

[Darren]

The trick is systems like Battleeye, Punkbuster, etc aren't running 100% of the time, they are usually started by the game when you start it and usually (although not always) closed when the game finishes executing.

While you are playing a game you probably aren't doing anything you have to worry about them spying on. You should if you are concerned check your running processes before doing anything you are worried about being spied on (you should do that anyway to be honest and get in the habit of knowing what should and shouldn't be running on your system). You can always use task manager to kill a rogue Battleeye/Punkbuster/etc processes if it is still running.

[Satoru]

Its anti-cheat software

The only people who have a 'problem' with it are cheaters.

[Desensitized]

Darren, thanks for your response! Does that mean that Battleeye is only able to "see" information that is in the running processes and only while Battleeye is running?

The way the terms and conditions of using Battleeye sound it has complete access to the system and is scanning / looking at everything on the hard drive - if it's only able to look at data that's in the running processes list then your point is a good one in that you won't be looking through pictures or writing emails or whatever, while you're playing the game.

I've been trying to search for more information on this, but I'm not seeing much. This seems crazy to me that people are just blindly installing software with absolute access to the entire hard drive without much discussion about it.

That's why I was also wondering if people are running it on machines that are basically dedicated gaming machines, and puting their personal data on seperate systems.

[Desensitized]

Satoru,
Thanks for your response. Are you 12?

[wuddih]

Desensitized님이 먼저 게시:

Satoru,
Thanks for your response. Are you 12?

he is at least 11, considering the age of his Steam account.

some anticheats are very intrusive, battleeye is one of them, especially because it sends whole suspicious files and not just their detection status.

[Darren]

Battleeye is one of the more intrusive ones, technically it has access to copy any file in any part of your system, but it's only going to do that if something flags it (such as the file being resident in memory when Battleeye is running and doing something that is suspicious to Battleeye at the same time). So if you've got sensitive information on your system it's not going to search for and find it because it has no interest in that unless it look like cheat software in how it's executing.

So as long as you don't run games while working on anything sensitive, and make sure you close the anti-cheat software afterwards you'll be fine.

[Desensitized]

Thanks for the response Darren!
As I'm looking at BE more, and reading more about it, it seems like what you're saying is true - according to what the developers have stated. I'm curious how do we know if the developers are telling us the truth? Are they employed by Steam and under Steam's control? It seems like BE is a stand-alone company and product?

[Darren]

Battleeye is entirely unrelated to Valve (who owns Steam). Valve supplies and supports VAC to those developers tbat want to use it.

Other developers prefer other anti-cheat software. There is a fair amount of investigation into what this software does by security engineers. Anything exceptional they usually flag in a paper you would be able to find online (just like you can find information about DRM schemes that amounted to rootkit viruses in how they worked).

[Desensitized]

Thanks again Darren! I really apprecaite that clarification - this is what my guess was, that BE is a standalone entitiy.I really don't like that this software is so intrusive and is essentially only held accountable by their "word" and not by Steam. If personal data does get stolen, hacked, etc. it's we are on our own and we did agree to allowing that access when installing BE so there really isn't any recourse. I think I have come to the conclusion that I will stay with Steam and Valve products only, at least for now.

Thank you again for all the replies guys, I really appreciate it.

[76561199407495642]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.