Steam is Valve Corporation's PC game store and platform, run by a privately held Washington-state corporation with no ad-supported free tier or third-party ad network integration. Valve's own privacy policy discloses account, payment, content-use, device and cookie/tracking-tag data collection scoped to operating the service, states "Valve does not sell Personal Data," and includes a full GDPR-style rights section (access, deletion, EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework certification). The optional monthly Hardware & Software Survey is explicitly opt-in and anonymous, and Steam's iOS App Store privacy label declares no cross-app tracking category. Valve discloses its exact corporate registration (Washington Secretary of State number, VAT ID) in the Steam Subscriber Agreement but, as a private company, publishes no parent/shareholder ownership chain. Valve's own December 2015 incident announcement documents a Christmas Day caching misconfiguration that briefly exposed some users' billing address, partial phone/card digits and email to other logged-in users before being identified and remediated the same day.
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Valve's privacy policy states that "game statistics" collected through use of Steam includes game preferences, progress, and playtime, plus device information such as operating system, device settings, unique device identifiers, and crash data, collected to operate Content and Services.
The Steam Mobile iOS app's Apple App Store privacy label, self-reported by Valve, discloses that data linked to the user's identity spans Purchases, Financial Info, Contact Info, User Content, Search History, Identifiers, Usage Data, and Diagnostics categories.
The Steam Subscriber Agreement identifies Valve as a privately held Washington-state corporation and discloses its exact registered office, Washington Secretary of State registration number, and EU VAT ID, though no parent company or shareholder chain is published since Valve is not publicly traded.
Valve's privacy policy states "Valve does not sell Personal Data" and limits disclosed data sharing to specific business purposes: subsidiaries, customer-support and CDN/game-server service providers, and, through the Steamworks API, game-ownership and related gameplay data made available to the specific developers/publishers of games a user owns.
Valve's own December 2015 incident announcement states that a Christmas Day caching misconfiguration, triggered while mitigating a DoS attack, caused some cached Steam Store pages to expose another user's billing address, partial Steam Guard phone digits, purchase history, partial credit card digits and/or email address to other logged-in users before Valve identified the issue and took the Store offline to remediate.
Valve's privacy policy discloses use of cookies and similar technologies, explicitly naming web beacons, pixels, ad tags, and device identifiers, to analyze service usage and support marketing/analytics/website functionality.
Valve's own Steam Hardware & Software Survey page states that participation in the monthly telemetry survey, which gathers hardware/software configuration data, is optional and anonymous.