Epic says his Game Store does not spy on you

This week, some corners of the video game Internet have been overwhelmed by a self-described "amateur analysis", suggesting a "pretty basic", spyware-like activity from the Epic Game Store and its launching software. Epic has now intervened to defend these accusations, while admitting an "obsolete implementation" that may allow unauthorized access to local information on Steam.

The article from Reddit "Epic Game Store, Spyware, Tracking, and You!" indicates a wide range of implications based on general observations of file and network access traffic while the Epic Game Store is running. But much of the article deals with Epic's association with the Chinese gaming giant Tencent, which holds a stake in the company.

"Tencent is a large but minority shareholder in Epic," co-founder and CEO Tim Sweeney wrote in response to the conspiracy theory in a Reddit thread. "I am the majority shareholder of Epic … The decisions made by Epic are ultimately mine, taken here in North Carolina based on my beliefs as a video game developer on the needs of the video game industry! "

Sweeney had similarly defended the relationship between Epic and Tencent in December, when similar concerns had been expressed. "Epic does not share user data with Tencent or any other company," he wrote at the time. "We do not share, sell, or facilitate access to it for advertising purposes, as do so many other companies." I am the founder and shareholder Epic main and I would never allow it. "

"Epic is controlled by Tim Sweeney," added Daniel Vogel, vice president of engineering at Epic, in response to another recent thread. "We have many external shareholders, none of whom have access to customer data."

Vogel then gave explanations about another suspicious activity from the Epic Games Store app. A "tracking.js" file, for example, is used to track Epic's Support-a-Creator revenue share statistics, he wrote. Vogel also pointed to the free source code behind features such as the anonymous hardware survey, the Unreal editor and the Chromium-based launcher user interface, which, he explains, are at the origin of most of the application activities that are described as splinters.

Vogel admits, however, that "the launcher creates an encrypted local copy of your Steam file localconfig.vdf" automatically and without the express permission of the user. However, he writes, this hashed file is only sent to Epic if you decide to import your Steam friends into Epic Game Store in order to find potential matches with other people who have chosen to participate .

Nevertheless, Sweeney acknowledged that Epic's use of local access to Steam files without direct authorization was likely to cause some users to be scrubbed. "You're right, we should only access the localconfig.vdf file after the user has chosen to import Steam friends," he wrote on Reddit. "The current implementation is a vestige of our haste to implement social features in the early days of Fortnite. In fact, it was my fault for pushing the pitching team to support it very quickly and then identifying the fact that we needed to change it. Since this problem is in the foreground, we will solve it. "

"This type of independent analysis of data software access … is a healthy trend and I would like to see it more widely," wrote Sweeney in another comment. "In analyzing the results, it is important to distinguish the normal from the abnormal … and separate the technical analysis of inflammatory rhetoric, such as the alienated claim that we are a group of people. Chinese spies. "