I saw an announcement from Grayjay coming to the Steam store a few minutes ago. That, apparently, is a move to distribute their desktop version. I can’t find an official announcement at their website.
I found the move interesting. I’ve never considered the Steam Store as a via for application distribution.
Do you think that we might see this happening with some privacy applications in the future?
No, where and how did you see this announcement from Grayjay?
Okay, that was enough information for me to quickly find the Steam page:
There is also a very recent discussion about the announcement:
How private is steam? Wouldn’t distributing their app with an external platform mean more work for them? There must be some additional rationale they have other than distribution.
I would imagine that the incentive for FUTO having a steam page would be another place to sell Grayjay licenses, and personal opinion incoming offering payment through steam can feel more polished than pushing users to an independent payment prompt on a “random” website.
Steam is not the best from a privacy standpoint, but provides a unique service, so many people in the privacy space still may choose to use it.
Oh yea I completely forgot that it is technically a paid product. I did not know that the payment prompt was that janky, so transitioning distribution to Steam makes sense.
I wonder if this is really a reliable source, it basically rank Proton, Whatsapp, DuckDuckGo, IVPN, Apple Services, Waze, Thunderbird, Telegram and Bitwarden all with same grade “C” and then rank Tuta, Mailfence, Startpage and Waterfox above with “A”. It seems a random rank.
This is straying a bit from the original topic, but I will say that I included the link to tosdr.org more for context than as any kind of endorsement. I try not to make broad statements like service x is “not the best” or “is bad” without providing some context as to why I believe this.
With regard to Steam specifically, there is plenty of discussion and documentation available which provide a much more in depth analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of Steam from privacy and digital sovereignty perspectives. I included the link to tosdr in my original post as a sort of ELI5[1] as to my perspective that Steam is “not the best” but still provides value.
I have gone back and forth in the past with regard to how much weight I put into the ratings given by ToSDR and sites like them, but I do still think that they can provide some value as a jumping off point for further research into a given service and their privacy implications, or as a halfway decent simplification for quick demonstration.
Explain Like I am 5 ↩︎
Probably not very private. Assume that every interaction and purchase is recorded and analyzed. At the same time, Valve has (enormously) contributed to the Linux ecosystem and turned it into a viable platform for day-to-day use (including gaming). Still, the Steam client is proprietary, meaning that it is either malware or possibly malware (and we have no real way to ascertain that it’s clean); if you want to use, it is probably better to run it as a separate user profile, and pay for games using gift cards purchased for cash.
ToS;DR rankings do not solely focus on Privacy. On Protons summary for example all bad points are unrelated to privacy.
Interesting, I prefer to get apps from stores and on windows Steam might actually be the best popular GUI option
Brave is ranked as a “B” while Tor Browser is ranked as “C”
I really whished they offered a proper desktop app, not just executables files that you need to create a shortcut yourself where updated is a mess etx.
Just use Flatpak
FUTO appears to have a Flatpak for Grayjay now: https://flathub.org/en/apps/app.grayjay.Grayjay
Great catch
