Steam is ditching a Google tool that Valve says ‘doesn’t align’ with its customer privacy approach

Valve is updating the system that shows game developers statistics about who's visiting their Steam pages. As part of that update, Steam will stop supporting Google Analytics—the most-used tool for tracking internet traffic—and developers who rely on it will instead have to use Steam's built-in traffic reporting tools.

"As time has gone on we've come to realize that Google's tracking solutions don't align well with our approach to customer privacy," Valve said in a blog post (opens in new tab). Support for Google Analytics will end on July 1, which is also when Google is switching off an old system, called Universal Analytics, and replacing it with a new service called Google Analytics 4.

Instead of supporting Google Analytics 4, Valve says it's focused on improving its own Steam traffic reporting tools. For example, it's introducing a regional breakdown that displays the geographical sources of Steam page traffic, which "can be most useful when considering the languages you might support in your game or where you might need to locate servers for a multiplayer game." That's something Google Analytics would've been able to do previously.

Valve says it will continue not to track demographic details like "age, gender, or race." And when the volume of traffic from an external source is below a certain threshold, it will categorize the source as "other" to avoid inadvertently communicating information that could be used to identify visitors. 

"All the tools and features that we discuss here are built with player privacy in mind; Steam will continue to not share personally identifiable information," Valve wrote. "This approach to privacy means that some trade-offs have been made along the way that limits how specific some reporting can be."

Valve's privacy policy hasn't changed (you can read it here (opens in new tab)), so ditching Google Analytics is an apparent effort to put itself in better compliance with its own rules. Valve did not say specifically what about Google Analytics doesn't "align" with its privacy approach, or whether the switch to Google Analytics 4 is the motivating factor or just a good moment to make the split. I've asked Google if it has a response to Valve's remarks.

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• Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-valve-google-analytics