They need to maintain trust with their users or else this could become a Ratner moment.

It's got almost nothing in common with what Ratner did, and I seriously doubt it would have an effect as devastating. Far more likely to be some scrote who wants to cheat and can no longer get away with it spreading false rumours to try and get the product pulled.

How many people will stick with Valve if they know it is reporting back on your porn habits? That was the Ratner moment I was thinking of. While Ratner explaining that its products were crap is one thing, I was equating the fact that if it did spy on your porn habits it could have been as damaging to Valve as the Ratner comment.

While I have no problem with Valve checking that you have not modified the game or to ensure that it is genuine licensed copy I would not like them scanning my drives at all. Some app stores might scan your applications folder to see what is installed they should also have their own records of what you have purchased in case you want to download it to a new machine etc. That is very different to scanning your browser history.

How many of the people complaining about this have considered how many other companies are probably already probably gathering/reporting back on their web browsing habits anyway? E.G. their ISP, Google, Mozilla, the government...

Valve have, as far as I can see, no great incentive to do so. The information as to which websites I might look at other than ones directly relating to cheating/circumventing their DRM is of no commercial use to them. They're interested in selling games and they make pots of money doing it already. Why waste time, money and effort gathering a lot of data they're not actually going to do anything with?

It is not really going to help them, but I am quite frankly surprised at how many apps and sites have tracking cookies. One app bartender is for cleaning up the menu bar and yet that has a tracking cookie. Every minute my machine deletes it.