i mean…that certainly is an explanation, but it’s a shit strategy:

there are a lot of objectively false names for emojis, you can’t expect people to get used to that…

“eyeroll” for example is called “bored”…which makes absolutely no sense. (at least in german, maybe it’s less bad in english)

I don’t see that ever leading to vendor lock-in, just perpetual frustration…

the emojis would be fine, if they used standard naming schemes like everyone else does…but for some ungodly reason they don’t adhere to standard nomenclature, so good fuckin luck finding the one you’re looking for!

also: WHY is the shortcut for emojis a fucking parenthesis??? why isn’t it a colon like in damn near every other app???

this is the worst thing about teams:

it forces you to re-learn chat app standards that have been in place for well over a decade, and it does so for abso-fucking-lutely no good reason!

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…