whats with Steam?

I went to play CS so installed HL and CS from the GOTY CD, but now everything has moved to steam. So I downloaded the Steam + CS cache installed it but stopped the registration.

I was filling it out when i read the privacy policy saying they collect personally identifyable info! WTF!! Whats up with that? Do i need to give my bank details just to play a game?

I play UT04 and quake 4 online without any of this hassle and dont understand why i cant just install a game (that i paid for) and play it online. I even installed CS1.5 to aviod this mumbo jumbo registration and it didnt work.

Whats everyones experiences with steam? should i get it? Am i being paraniod after reading this?

 

I am not sure if it was a requirement to actually give your credit card info to them or not; you need it at least to purchase new games, etc. on Steam, but I don't know that it's a requirement.

There would be personal information in terms of your registration, etc. so if that concerns you, you probably should not use Steam.

I personally haven't had any problems with Steam, and have used it to purchase some third party games sold through it (like The Ship).

-Zadillo

 

i didnt give them any info, just a name and password.

 

I bought CS online and completed the purchase process with credit card online...then repeated for DoD. No problems since then with Steam, at least in terms of privacy, spam or things like that.
If you bought it in a retail store they shouldn't ask for personal info though...that's weird.

 

"Collecting personally identifiable information" has nothing to do with your credit card or other bank details
It just means that they collect information that can later be used to detect what *you* do on Steam. That is, they can tell that on this or that date, your account was logged into CSS for exactly 2.5 hours. Non-identifiable information would just allow them to detect that "on this date, a total of x accounts were playing this game"