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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2025

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  • mosquito nets in third world countries

    oooohhh…yeah…about those…

    turns out the mosquito nets are devastating local fish populations, because people use them to fish, since they get them as a finished product instead of having to knit nets themselves. and starvation being a bigger immediate threat, they prioritize that over malaria.

    the nets are also laced with toxic chemicals (against the mosquitoes), which are extremely toxic to fish.

    they also have much smaller holes, so they catch the young offspring as well, leading to rapid depletion of stocks.

    so, yeah…good idea in theory, but didn’t turn out so great…





  • afaik the client does collect a bunch if data, most (all, i think? but not a 100% on that) of which is opt-in.

    they do need stuff like IPs for internet related features.

    telemetry wise there’s the steam hardware survey, which is opt-in, and it asks every single time it attempts to collect your systems hardware and OS information. this could technically be identifying information, but since it’s opt-in it’s not a privacy violation and it’s entirely optional. (plus it’s super useful for all involved: users, devs, and steam. it’s kind of a win-win and straight up necessary info for devs to know which hardware they should optimize for)

    they might be putting it at the top because steam has native support for DRM?

    but that’s also weird, because DRM isn’t a privacy violation. it’s a shitty practice, barely does anything, barely works, and keeps breaking or hobbling otherwise perfectly good games, all of which is shitty, but it’s little to do with privacy. and the dev has to specifically opt-in and integrate it as a feature…unless they’re thinking of 3rd party DRM that can be waaay more intrusive, like Vanguard… THAT’S a privacy and security nightmare just waiting to blow up in people’s faces.

    otherwise…i haven’t really heard anything bad about steam privacy wise?

    doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be concerned about, but i feel like there’d been some news about it if there was…