Is Steam Spyware

Some users have seen non-Steam related information (like names of private files on their computer) show up inside their Steam cache files, raising privacy concerns.

This is actually a result of the way Windows handles files.

The cache file gets created on the client using the Windows CreateFile() command. This command will create the file but does not initialize it.

Due to the large size of the file, the Steam client does not initialize the empty data blocks in it, as this can take an appreciable amount of time.

On NTFS machines, files created with this method have the property of appearing empty (initialized to zero), but for FAT32 machines, it shows up as whatever old data was sitting on drive in the sectors that just got allocated for the cache.

This data is never uploaded or read by the Steam client. Eventually, as Steam downloads more data, the old data is overwritten.

Other users have encountered Steam seemingly connecting to the IP address of known spyware sites. What is actually happening, is an error in the reverse DNS lookup, the IP address it is actually connecting to is simply one of our servers. During its normal operation, Steam will connect to and communicate with a number of different servers on our network.

Please read our privacy policy. It is made clear what information will be and will not be collected.

In summary: No, Steam is not Spyware. Make sure you are keeping your Spyware detection software up to date to minimize false positives such as these.