Hiding your activity from friends

[Warp]

Perhaps one of the most-requested changes to Steam is the option to hide your purchases and activity from everybody, including your friends. Yet there is no option for this.

I understand perfectly why Steam announces your purchases to friends: It increases sales. It entices people to try and buy games their friends play. It's a good business model. I understand this.

However, this is a question of privacy. User choice of privacy should always trump advertisement tactics. Bypassing your customer's privacy in order to increase sales is not acceptable.

And no, the answer to not wanting your friends to see that you are playing eg. some naughty dating sim is not "get better friends" or "unfriend them". I shouldn't have to remove anybody from my friend list simply because I don't want to announce to the world what kind of games I'm playing. If I'm embarrassed to play some pervy game, that ought to be a private matter of mine; Steam should not be in the position of advertising it to all my friends. I don't even understand why this is a question.

Even worse, Steam does not make clear what exactly it's showing to your friends. When you buy or start a game, you have no idea what exactly your friends are seeing. Steam does not inform you in any way of this. It all happens behind the scenes without you knowing.

And even worse, the privacy settings of your profile do not stop Steam from announcing your purchases to your friends, or the fact that you are playing a certain game. Even setting your profile to fully private will still allow people in your friends list to know these things; this has been tested.

This is outright misleading. Nowhere does the Steam privacy page tell you about this.

The thing is, Steam is probably selling less of those certain games because of this very reason. Many people are too embarrassed to buy them because Steam breaches their privacy by annoucing their dirty little secrets to all their friends. You can laugh all you like, but that's not cool.


Edit: Nowhere in the Steam Subscriber Agreement, or the Privacy Policy Agreement, is this mentioned. Not even in passing or indirectly, and most certainly not explicitly. This means that as a Steam user, you never agreed to this, not even inadvertently. Which in turn means that if you agree that this is something that Steam should not be doing, you have a legitimate privacy complaint.

If you agree that this is something that Steam should not be doing, you can write a formal complaint to Valve. Go to http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/ and at the very end of the page there is a "Privacy Feedback" link that will take you to a form that you can use to send a message to Valve.

Please be formal, civil and polite. Make a formal complaint about Steam divulging your personal purchases and other game activities to third-parties in a manner that identifies you as the purchaser, without your consent or knowledge, and that you never agreed to that, because it's not mentioned in the Subscriber Agreement. Express that you do not consent for this private information to be divulged to other people, even if they are in your Steam friends list, and that you shouldn't have to purge your friends list to keep this information private.

Hopefully, if enough people send complaints to Valve, they will do something about it.


Edit 2: Here is a suggestion I have to solve these problems:

Allow games to be bought in "incognito mode". This may be, for example, a tickbox you could select when you buy a game. If it has been selected, then absolutely nothing of you purchasing, owning or playing that game will be broadcast to anybody in your friends list (or any other third party). They wouldn't see anything about you owning the game (even if they own it themselves.) From their perspective it would be exactly as if you hadn't bought nor owned the game at all.

This may be something that could be enabled or disabled by the game publisher, when submitting it to Steam. If the publisher does not wish to allow people to buy their game incognito, they could choose to do so. But some publishers may well want to allow people to buy their game incognito (especially publishers of certain game genres). The option to buy incognito could be presented to the end user when purchasing the game, if the publisher has chosen to allow it.

Also, what is and is not broadcast to people in your friends list should be made explicit, unambiguous and visible, with a concrete list of such things (rather than vague generic statements). At the very least this should be in the Privacy Policy Agreement, but also preferably somewhere even more visible.

[Black Blade]

Originally posted by Sgt_SoB:

steam suxs, forced to use because they hold cd keys hostage. wonder if its crimanal behavier

No its not
As you can just not buy the games to start with

@OP i do some what agree with your idea, and i am sure its something many want

[capt_kryptonite]

There you go

[Warp]

Setting your profile to private does not hide your purchases from your friends. (Also I don't know if it hides the info popup that appears when you start playing a game, because I haven't tested it. I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't.)

This is matter of privacy policy. It doesn't matter why you want to hide your activities from your friends; Steam shouldn't be in the position where they can broadcast your activities to other people without permission and acknowledgement, especially when it happens behind the scenes, without you knowing or being informed about it. You also shouldn't be forced to remove people from your friend list completely, thus hindering any other activities you might want do with them through Steam, just so that Steam wouldn't invade your privacy.

The problem is, once you have close friends in your Steam friend list, you are pretty much excluded from buying games you want to keep personal. If you buy them, your friends will see it, and it may cause embarrassment. If you unfriend them, they will ask you why you did that (what exactly are you going to tell them?) There just isn't any way of keeping it private. The only remaining option is not to buy the games at all. Neither you nor the game developers probably are very happy about that.

[Hanomaly]

Originally posted by Warp:

The problem is, once you have close friends in your Steam friend list, you are pretty much excluded from buying games you want to keep personal. If you buy them, your friends will see it, and it may cause embarrassment. If you unfriend them, they will ask you why you did that (what exactly are you going to tell them?) There just isn't any way of keeping it private. The only remaining option is not to buy the games at all. Neither you nor the game developers probably are very happy about that.

You tell them: "i unfriended you on Steam because you are an immature person who thinks taunting people over the games they play is 'cool'. One day when you grow up a little we can be friends again, like perhaps when we are 60 and have learned making fun of people over the games they play is ridiculous."

As someone above said, seriously, only young kids could possibly care about this. i'm not even that old and if a friend teases me about a game, i just shrug it off. i don't need a friend's approval to enjoy something, nor am i embarassed about what games i play.

Hopefully at some point you can have friends who don't try to make you feel bad. Or, hopefully you can get to a point within yourself where you have the self confidence to enjoy what you want to enjoy without needing the approval of your friends.

~
Oh, and if you are young and still worried about such things you could lie, i suppse. Tell your friend your mom or dad made you buy the "embarrassing" game for your little brother or sister. Or lie and sound cool and say you bought it because your "girlfriend" wanted to play it.That way your immature friends still respect you as someone who only plays "cool" games, and yet doubly respect you for also having a girlfriend. Win/win.

[Τhe Rolling Cheese Wheel]

If you care so much, set your profile to private. No one can see your profile, or anything you do.

[Ganger]

Originally posted by Warp:

If you buy them, your friends will see it, and it may cause embarrassment.

I fail to understand this Warp... I say again, only kids and very inmature adults would think this.

But I could understand it if it was about toys, you wouldn't want to be seen playing with dolls if you were a boy say; but games are not the same.

Look on my games list, I got lots of crap on there, I even got 'winnie the poo' and 'pat and mat' in my list (only my little girl plays it tho, honest).

[Warp]

Originally posted by Τhe Rolling Cheese Wheel:

If you care so much, set your profile to private. No one can see your profile, or anything you do.

Didn't you read my original post? I once tried setting everything to private, bought a game, and asked a friend if he could see it, and he could.

I don't even understand why matters of privacy are even a question here. If you go to the toilet to take a dump, would you want your friends to watch you?

The answer still isn't "get better friends". Some things you just want to keep private, and it doesn't even matter what the reason is. People should have that fundamental right. I don't even understand why you are defending Steam's policy here.

[Black Blade]

Originally posted by Warp:

Didn't you read my original post? I once tried setting everything to private, bought a game, and asked a friend if he could see it, and he could.

I don't even understand why matters of privacy are even a question here. If you go to the toilet to take a dump, would you want your friends to watch you?

The answer still isn't "get better friends". Some things you just want to keep private, and it doesn't even matter what the reason is. People should have that fundamental right. I don't even understand why you are defending Steam's policy here.

So remove all the friends, change the profile to private, and you will have full privacy
There not blocking you from getting privacy if you want it

Even that i do agree that i think some users may like to have something like these

[Agranite (Luong)]

I can so relate to OP. My rl friends already makes jokes on how often I play female character since they look better to me, and cash shop for costumes. Well we make fun of each other constantly.

I'm pretty much plan on creating an alt accounts for visual novels, when I purchase a window tablet, since I enjoy reading mangas, light novels, and visual novels. Since a lot of visual novels have certain content, it's not something I want to broadcast to my friends to make cheap shot jokes. Currently I can only read mangas and light novels on my android device.

[joking.aces]

I think it shouldn't really matter what games you buy, if they make fun of you for the games that you buy then they shouldn't be on your friends list... this is coming from the guy though that only adds his real life friends to his friends list though because I don't really like just sending out random requests to people... unless I feel like I could get along with them.

[Astori Heichalot]

got caught playing hentai games arent ya

[Warp]

Originally posted by Astori Heichalot:

got caught playing hentai games arent ya
:f2_happy:

No. But why are you assuming I'm trying to avoid the subject? I quite clearly gave "naughty dating sim" as an example in my original post.

[Random Reference #98]

It doesn't matter what the reason for wanting to keep a purchase private is, it's rediculous that Valve thinks it's acceptable to broadcast every purchase you make to everyone you know. It doesn't matter whether you care or not that they know, it's not Valve's place to tell them what you spend your money on.

Would anyone be ok with this if Walmart posted your receipt to your friends on Facebook every time you went there or Amazon did the same every time you order something?

There's nothing immature about wanting to preserve one's privacy, it's immature to shortsightedly throw it away.

[Black Blade]

Originally posted by Random Reference #98:

It doesn't matter what the reason for wanting to keep a purchase private is, it's rediculous that Valve thinks it's acceptable to broadcast every purchase you make to everyone you know. It doesn't matter whether you care or not that they know, it's not Valve's place to tell them what you spend your money on.

Would anyone be ok with this if Walmart posted your receipt to your friends on Facebook every time you went there or Amazon did the same every time you order something?

There's nothing immature about wanting to preserve one's privacy, it's immature to shortsightedly throw it away.

I am pretty sure some will not care

Any how as much as i do agree, its not like they show it publicly, if you really want privacy, just remove all friends and use Steam with out that, no friends will know noting

I do say that i agree will be nice to hide it, but i do not agree to put it like its forced upon the users

[Saskyou]

Originally posted by Black Blade:

I am pretty sure some will not care :D:

Any how as much as i do agree, its not like they show it publicly, if you really want privacy, just remove all friends and use Steam with out that, no friends will know noting

I do say that i agree will be nice to hide it, but i do not agree to put it like its forced upon the users

I don't think you get the point of the question at all.