If you thought that the changes made to Steam’s privacy settings would kill Steam Spy, well, you could be right, but the problems that the site is experiencing isn’t connected to that at all. The General Data Protection Regulation that is being enforced by the EU is making Valve change their privacy settings, but the Steam EULA still hasn’t been updated, so there is something else that is messing with the Steam Spy site.
At first, the creator of Steam Spy thought that the new privacy settings that made game ownership information private by default would kill his site, as he needed that information to be public in order to use it in the way that he does. So, when something went wrong he thought that it was the GDPR changes, but it wasn’t. Sergey Galyonkin said in his official post:
As you might know, on 11th of April, 2018 Valve has made changes to their Steam Web API, removing owned games from user’s information, unless they actively opt-in.
Many people, myself included, at first attributed that change to GDPR compliance, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. Valve still exposes your real name, achievements, groups, screenshots, and friends by default and still hasn’t updated their EULA to comply with GDPR. It doesn’t mean they won’t, but the API change was definitely not caused by that.
He sent messages to Valve, but of course, they did not respond. Sergey is still working on making Steam Spy do its job, even though it is harder than before as he needs to figure out a new algorithm. We wish him the best of luck in his endeavors, and we hope Steam Spy stays alive, as it’s a site that helped a lot of people.
