Is Steam spying on you?

After probing Steams code some people found detail within Steam that lead them to think that Steam watches what's on your hard drive....

Valve's main man, Gabe Newell says,

"Not true. We have no interest in what's on your hard drive.

When we first heard about this, we were perplexed. Then we realized that

the people who were seeing this were running FAT32 instead of NTFS. In

Windows, if you have the NTFS file system, it zeros out sectors before it

reallocates them. With FAT32, it doesn't. So if you allocate a large file

(it doesn't matter if it's a Steam cache or some other application's files),

in FAT32 if you open that file, you will see whatever data was left over

from the previous writes to those sectors until your application writes over

that data with new data. So on FAT32, Steam allocates 400 MB of space,

fills up 200 MB with game stuff, and the remaining 200 MB contains whatever

was already there.

Does this make sense? You can try it with other large unfilled files on

your system and see the same thing."

-Gabe

So there you have it folks. Valve has absolutely no interest in your pornography collection or your indexed and alphabetized hoard of mp3s that would earn you an RIAA lawsuit quicker than you can say kazaa! ;)

-Keldyn M.

News source: 3dnewz.com