Hi, I’ve been wondering about the invasiveness of anticheat products when it comes to user privacy, particularly anticheat solutions that currently support linux - EAC and Battleye.
Anyone has insight on what information these programs currently aim to collect on the user?
Easy anti cheat runs in userspace on Linux, and thus is slightly less bad than Windows one. There is no info about exact data collection that they do, and they usually claim that they only check for code execution on memory and not scanning user directories (on their website). But EAC is Epic and Tencent, so I actually don’t think anyone can trust what data they collect. I’d not run it at all.
I think it is still has access to personal PC if used through Steam/Proton compatibility layer, but yeah I guess sandboxing the entire steam setup or a VM would solve it. Would a steam flatpak be as effective? Last time I tried EAC (Elden Ring) it was by putting it on a dual boot of Bazzite, so I didn’t care too much about sandboxing.
Is there a guide we can follow? Though many of us use VMs, a gaminng VM has special requirements that a lot of us may struggle with, for example GPU passthrough
Though I cant see the anticheat going so fas as enabling EXT4, BTRFS, etc just so to probe around at that level.
You should be fine. Probably.
I would find it ironic and funny if anticheat will go so far as to install kernel level stuff look around other Linux file systems meanwhile Windows wont touch it with a 10foot pole.