Is Valorant Spyware?

Do PC games spy on you? This video tries to answer these questions with cybersecurity tools, sysinternals, wireshark and EULA observations.

[Pirateking]

if anti cheat runs while the game is not even running that's a huge red flag and i will never touch it

[Eagledelta]

Quick correction - FACEiT is for Counterstrike 2, but it is a 3rd party Anti-Cheat. It is NOT run by Valve or required to play the game. Instead Valve uses a Server side Anti-Cheat

[xtan-yt]

I am from India and our government banned the pubg mobile game, tencent released another "Indian" version of the game and claimed the game will not communicate with Chinese servers again. But with a small network lookup i find out that the game is still sending data back n forth to Chinese servers.

[Elisabeth]

Funny thing, some cheats on other games doesn't work if vanguard is active

[michelians]

Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes, it is.

[Zachsnotboard]

I blocked vanguard on my firewall when I wasn’t playing and it would blue screen my pc when I restarted lol. Had to uninstall riot games completely.

[abdool]

"bUt I dOnt HaVe anYthiNg tO hiDe, I doNt CaRe if I haVe maLware in mY coMpuTer"...

[bc]

It's _something_ ! I called Razer for a failure of a pretty new headset - instead of asking if I'd turned it off and on again, they asked if I had installed Valorant.

[AgniButWithChronicBackPain]

Playing Valorant should already be unfortunate enough.

[paparoxo]

And people say that Linux is worse for not running some anticheat games like Valorant, but in reality it's protecting people's privacy.

[makerspace¹]

bro I had no clue about any of this. Thank you for the video and explanation.

[thesun___]

Something that was not mentioned was that Tencent is legally required to send information to the Chinese government. Have fun playing Valorant!

[kidnamedfinger.productions]

Spookiest thing is that kernel drivers have the ability to read memory of other processes meaning they can monitor absolutely everything you do, decrypt your connections to websites, decrypt your crypto wallet and many more.

[i_drive.]

My boyfriend used to close vanguard after he was done playing but it messed up his game. Now his game freezes more often, takes time to load him into the lobby and gives him a warning for ban after every game even though he doesn't seem to break any rules. He had no choice but to uninstall

[DynaOne]

So can’t there be an option to not have it running except when trying to run the game and only restarting the pc then and there with the Vanguard in the startup list? Kinda how some very old games/programs worked where you’d insert your disk and restart to boot it

Having to manually close it or even uninstall it because you don’t play every day or week seems tedious.

[DeividasGedgaudas]

I remember a friend begged me to hop on Valorant, jumped through all the hoops of recovering my user, installing the game, installing the anticheat, enabling and disabling windows features that the game wanted me to... and as soon as I launched the game I blue screened with kernel security error :D (i9-12900k, rtx3080, msi z690)
Uninstalled everything, re-setup how I liked my machine and never looked back

[ToaOfs]

I think it's important to note that FaceIt is a community project and does not come directly from Valve, the company behind CS2, and they have nothing to do with the FaceIt project. The official anti-cheat of CS2 is VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat).

[Omega_o]

Where is that mountain range from your desktop background? Very inormative video by the way.

[SiennaVathy]

thanks for always being so thorough in your explanations!

[XAMEREN]

Dont forget that kernel level games and apps make you more vulnerable