Melody Fwygon

No.

It is hard to have both; but not impossible. You can still be privacy friendly without sacrificing necessary functionality.

It will require that the “provider” of such a dataset constantly scrub, sanitize and remove data that would cause privacy hazards as quickly as reasonably possible however. That in and of itself is a technical challenge; though not impossible.

Ideally there’s not a whole lot of data that needs to be kept.

Legitimately all that needs to be stored is a few things:

• Location (GPS)
• SSIDs (Wifi APs only)
• Cell ID & MCC/MNC (Cell Towers only)

and things they MUST NOT STORE OR SHARE like:

• IPs of contributors for longer than a few days
• un-hashed BSSIDs (Wifi/BT)
• MAC addresses (Wifi/BT)
• IMEI/IMSIs (or other cellular identifiers derived from them)
• APs that don’t exist in a fixed location (Think mobile hotspot SSIDs) for longer than a fixed amount of time.
• BT devices
• Non-unique SSIDs or IDs that may indicate no user config took place and manufacturer did not differentiate device ID. (Things like “SETUP” with no unique number (SSIDs like"SETUP-be3fd34d" would be valid) or “[ISP]@HOME” or “[ISP]Wifi” which provide no meaningful discriminators)

Linux must achieve 100% compatibility. Otherwise the doubters will not shut up.

I like that he is being decisive about it. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the feature was only being delayed because of internal project politics or quirky policies that normally make sense, but don’t in this specific scenario.

Gabe Newell knows that any potential buyer will run Valve into the ground. Thus he already promised too long ago that he would never sell or let Valve go public.

Considering how many game studios that Microsoft just killed off in the last 3 years alone; they’re never going to be worthy of buying Valve.