Steam Inventory - Privacy Settings for Individual Items or Item Categories

[Cr@zY-$HeeP]

TL;DR

I would like to have the ability to select Privacy Settings for individual items in the Steam Inventory. If that's too complicated, perhaps it would be possible to implement Privacy Settings for the individual "Item Categories" that Steam already provides (i.e. Steam Community, Steam Coupons, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Rust, etc.).

THE PROBLEM

Currently, the Privacy Settings for my Steam Inventory is set to "Friends Only". Alternatively, my options are "Public" or "Private". Basically, my Inventory can either be completely hidden from everyone, completely on display to the entire world, or completely on display only to users in my Friends List.

Given how expansive the Steam Inventory system has become over the past several years, I feel these options are no longer sufficient - especially when it comes to trade.

EXAMPLES

If you are looking to exchange Trading Cards with the general public, your only option is to set your entire Inventory to "Public". Unfortunately, by doing so you allow users to not only browse (and make offers on) your Trading Card collection, but also your game-specific Items / Skins, Steam Backgrounds, Emoticons, Coupons, and more - even if you have zero intention of trading those items.

Basically, if you want to trade, you are required to display everything you own. Otherwise, you can choose to display nothing at all, and remain locked out of the ability to trade effectively. This is inefficient...

If I have a yard sale, I don't have to suddenly choose between offering nothing, or offering the *entire* contents of my home. When I want to exchange an old toaster with strangers online, I don't include pictures of my refrigerator and microwave in the listing, as though these are additional "options" for the buyer to consider along with the toaster. If I want to trade a bunch of baseball cards with someone, I don't expect to receive incoming offers for one of my baseball cards *and* the car in my driveway - the trade should be limited to my baseball cards alone.

CONSIDERATIONS

"Just list your items for sale on the Marketplace"
This does not work for items that are marked as "Tradable, Not Marketable". This includes things like Gems, Coupons, Gifts, and content for games that are no longer available. If someone wants to trade Coupons exclusively, why do they also need to allow incoming offers for their game-specific Items / Skins?

"Just decline offers for items that you don't want to trade"
This doesn't address Privacy concerns. Again, I don't invite strangers into my home to browse everything I own - I only want them to see the items that I'm willing to part with. I also don't want certain items in my Inventory to be "scraped" by bots.

"Just make a separate account to handle trades"
In my opinion, this is a larger waste of resources for Valve than simply adding additional Privacy Settings. Extraneous "alt" accounts floating around, with minimal security implementations (since Steam Guard can only sync to a single device) represent more of a headache than a solution.

"This would take a ton of development time"
The "switch" for Privacy settings is already there - I would just like to see a change in how that switch gets applied. I am proposing three solutions below, with Solution A being the most labor-intensive, and Solution B being far easier to implement.

SOLUTION A

Allow users to mark individual items as either "Public", "Private" or "Friends Only" from within the Inventory. After you select an Item in the Inventory, the right-hand panel that shows the Item information should display a dropdown menu with Privacy Settings for that individual item. This way, prospective traders would be able to display select items from their Inventory to the general public (i.e. specific Trading Cards), without inviting unwanted attention to items that are "not for sale".

The challenge with this particular solution would be implementing a Privacy "flag" for every single item in every single user's Inventory. While it represents a single data point to be added to each item, this can add up extremely quickly when you consider there are probably billions of items floating around in Valve's databases.

SOLUTION B

If it's too complicated to have these settings apply to individual items, it would be helpful to grant the existing Privacy Settings to the Inventory "Categories" that are already present. You can see these "Categories" when you browse your Steam Inventory, at the top of the page (just below the "Trade Offers" button).

With this implementation, someone could make their Steam Community items Public, but their Steam Coupons, CS:GO, and TF2 items could simultaneously remain Private. A change like this could be added to the existing Privacy Settings page, where a list of available Inventory Categories could be displayed - each with its own dropdown menu for "Public", "Private" or "Friends Only". This significantly cuts down the amount of additional data points being implemented, when compared to Solution A.

Unfortunately, this also means that Solution B is not as robust as Solution A - for example, if I want to exchange Trading Cards exclusively, I would have to set my Steam Community items to "Public", which would also show Gems, Backgrounds, and Emoticons (all of which I would prefer to not display). However, it is significantly better than the current implementation of "everything or nothing".

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Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[Mailer]

Agreed. Scammers tend to use Steam Groups or a publicly visible inventory to pick their targets so at least being able to choose inventory privacy settings for a game-by-game basis would be a big difference.

We'll just have to hope that Valve bundles this feature in whenever they get around to extending the privacy settings on Steam, because they are currently a bit lacking.

[Stellar Remnant]

Seems reasonable. You have my support.

[Cr@zY-$HeeP]

Originally posted by vbzp:

I am constantly getting harassed by people who somehow quickly find out that I received some kind of knife from the case and try to get this knife in any fraudulent way.

Originally posted by Mailer:

Agreed. Scammers tend to use Steam Groups or a publicly visible inventory to pick their targets

Yes, this was my experience as well, unfortunately. Bots will scrape your inventory and then send their randomized accounts to spam you with requests, etc. As soon as I set my Inventory to "Friends Only" the requests suddenly ceased.

Basically, I'm forced to choose between trading and being spammed, or not trading at all, and having a large portion of my inventory (which could really benefit other Steam users looking to earn Badges) hidden away forever. Feels bad...

Originally posted by MiniHerc:

Seems reasonable. You have my support.

Thanks!

[AmsterdamHeavy]

I see no issue with Solution B. "A" sounds very tedious. Much needed functionality.

[aytimothy]

bump.

Yes, this is a pretty important addition, considering the current hellscape that is the trading sphere.

Either: Better privacy or the current botting and scamming landscape needs to change; disappear (basically the elimination of the need to require this).

[Yandy]

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