It turns out that the launch software of the popular battle royal 'Fort Night' has collected data of Steam secretly

When playing a game distributed by Epic Games on a PC, such as the battle royal game " Fort Night " which is popular all over the world, it is necessary to start software called " Epic Games Launcher ". The software required for the game distribution platform, Epic Games Store , collected the data of Steam silently by collecting it, the user of the exchange bulletin board site "Metacouncil" of the OD creator and game fan revealed.

News-Epic Game Store, Spyware, Tracking, and You! | MetaCouncil
https://metacouncil.com/threads/epic-game-store-spyware-tracking-and-you.766/

The user data of Steam of the game distribution platform provided by Valve is stored in the directory "Steam \ userdata \ [Account ID]" on the PC, and is a cryptogram of "config \ localconfig.vdf" that stores game property information. Copy is also saved at the same time. This data includes the play history of friends and games connected by Steam. Also, Steam uses "Steam Cloud" to synchronize data in the cloud, and these data are saved as "localhistory". Epic Games Launcher reads this localhistory, encrypts it, and writes it on "Epic \ SocialBackup" as "RANDOM HEX CODE_STEAM ACCOUNT ID. Bak" data.

This RANDOM HEX CODE_STEAM ACCOUNT ID. Bak has friend information and ...

The software played and the history of the time recorded are included.

So, I checked the behavior of the Epic Games Launcher using " Microsoft Process Explorer ", which allows Metacouncil user lashman to see which files and registry keys are open. Began to investigate where the

Furthermore, the data below userdata is scanned, the game title and ...

I found that I was loading localconfig.vdf. It has also been reported on Reddit that UDP traffic has been detected that is sending data collected by Epic Games Launcher.

In the image below, "42834588" is the ID of lashman's Steam account.

The Epic Games store, an emerging game distribution platform, has been pointed out as rivaling the industry's largest and long-established Steam, and it attracts the attention of many gamers, " Division 2 ", " Metro Exodus " and " Sometimes the Epic Games store made the phoenic point a monopoly title for the Epic Games store, which made it impossible for Steam to buy it on the release date.

The competition between Steam and Epic Games stores in PC game sales intensifies, "The Division 2 (Division 2)" will be distributed at Epic Games stores instead of Steam-GIGAZINE

Then, the game fan who knew that Epic Games Launcher was collecting data of Steam secretly developed into a situation that "Epic Games is unreliable" is a big deal. In response, Daniel Vogel, vice president of Epic Games, commented on Reddit, an overseas bulletin board.

In the comments "Epic Games Launcher regularly sends hardware surveys such as CPUs and GPUs as described in our privacy policy" "The majority of the launcher UI is open source Chromium Implemented using web technology rendered by "" is importing Steam friends or localconfid.vdf with explicit permission. However, this file information is to import Steam friends Only if selected will be sent to Epic Games, then only the friend's hash ID will be sent and no other information will be sent from the file. "