What personally identifiable information does Valve collect with Steam?
A. The only information players are required to provide is a valid email address and a password, and to verify they are older than 13 years of age. All other information at registration time is optional. Valve does track the time spent playing a game, per account, but does not collect information about what other processes are running concurrently on the computer. A player’s profile can be set to hidden, which prevents other people from seeing that player’s playtime statistics. These statistics are also recorded while in offline mode, and are transmitted the next time you connect in online mode. Crash logs do sometimes collect extra information such as what processes were running at the time of the crash, and these logs contain your Steam ID for tech support to use.
