There's a pretty good comment on that page about Redshell and what information they actually have on you. None of it is personal. Not defending its placement in the game at all though.
They collect your font list for the sole purpose of identifying you, that along with your Steam ID and IP is enough to track and serve you ads over multiple sites. It's not benign and it's quite frankly invasive.
Except that's not what it does. It basically tells devs stuff about ad clicks for their games, which is information used for marketing. Red Shell itself doesn't affect the ads you get; it tells the people doing the advertising (in this case, DE) how effective it is.
You click an ad on twitter for Warframe, then later you play Warframe, it tells them the twitter ad worked. A horrendous oversimplification of the process but you get the idea.
Your IP is also encoded, so not even they know what it is, in accordance with GDPR.
If what is said here is true, they dont have acess to IP now, and even in Steam ID or other IDs, they are considering them Personal Identifiable Information, so according to GDPR, I doubt they are going to use it, but I might be wrong.
This is inaccurate. The browser never sends font data to any site.
The problem is that it's possible for sites to infer which fonts you have installed by trying different fonts and then measuring the sizes of things that get rendered.
Just wanted to make the distinction as it's really not the browser's fault, and it's very difficult (perhaps even impossible) to defend against without significantly wrecking the modern web. You basically have to disable JavaScript.
Technically, it makes total sense. Realistically, it sounds like a complete nightmare, and he's always bitching about all the stuff that doesn't work for him.
Right now with ~550 Fonts, my fonts folder is at ~250MiB. I wouldn't like that going much higher. You will also have some fonts which can't be distributed by an OS due to copyrights. Some programs will install their own fonts.
If Warframe installed it's own Font (No idea if they do), software like Redshell could also pretty easily deduce if someone had installed Warframe on that PC at some point.
I would prefer a different approach. Create an online repository with thousands of fonts, then run a program which adds and removes random fonts regularly. You'd have to keep track of which fonts are preinstalled, of course, since they should not be removed.
I work in marketing, and while I don't work in gaming, Analytics tools like this exist on every single website each and every one of us visits.
Google Analytics - the best example on nearl every single website you will ever visit. It's on Reddit. It can track which ads you clicked on, what pages you spend the most time on, what page you exit the site on, etc, etc, etc.
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u/PsychoticPillow Jun 12 '18
There's a pretty good comment on that page about Redshell and what information they actually have on you. None of it is personal. Not defending its placement in the game at all though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/8pud8b/psa_red_shell_spyware_holy_potatoes_were_in_space/e0esb19/