FANATICAL ASSISTANT BROWSER EXTENSION???????

Anyone else having a bit of hesitation with this? Do you feel comfortable sharing your steam account? Or do I need to remove my tin foil hat? :thinking:

https://www.fanatical.com/en/assistant

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Yeah, I saw the notifications earlier, but I decided to pass… too much is too much I think.

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No.

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To answer the real question:

Never remove the hat! It is the only thing preventing the real world from seeing your dreams!!! The tiny bones are all that holds together your body, 7-11 is open for 25 hours a day and the smoothie machines are truly bottomless. Remove the hat and all that changes.

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Random thought sorry may be off topic. Is ones steam account an asset of sorts? I feel like its kinda meta. If steams gos offline what happens to the games? If you had the you could crack em i guess, but cloud is gone. Also could one sell there steam account? I guess i bring this up is we spend thousands for what really?

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According to the Valve policy regarding personalized accounts, is that they are not transferable.

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Indeed, in this way they are not really an asset, however they can be thought of as social capital if that is helpful at all.
So you are spending money for first the experience of the games you buy, and second the ā€œsocialā€ value of owning so many games on steam.

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Looks to much like an unnecessary middle man. I found GoG because of you guys. I had just been comparing Steam to Humble Bundle. If you add GoG in there plus the daily deals here it’s an effective way of monitoring the market. It looks way shady too. Almost like they want it to. Fishy. Never was much for television/music marketing as applied to the gaming industry. Always found myself even taking pride in the way they have always seemed so determined to be civil compared to most artistic western markets. The only real enemy they ever chose were other gamers and ā€˜pirates’. Maybe it’s a Napster trap. :question:

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Fishy indeed.

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Aaaay! Programmer to the rescue! So…yes, it’s good that you are hesitant about giving access of one system to another system. It’s a healthy level of skepticism that keeps us from installing programs willy-nilly and getting all the virus. All of them. Like this one. Seriously, you shouldn’t click that link, it could be anything.

But first off, the way you give access to the Fanatical Assistant (FA) to access your Steam account is setup through a secure login (the FA will never see your Steam password and can’t spend Steam wallet money). Same goes for other accounts you allow it to connect to.

The only mildly troubling thing is the way it presents other site’s deals to you - technically it has the power to lie to you by displaying a higher price on another site (it can edit or change anything according to permissions), with the possibly nefarious goal of funneling you to a purchase on their site. That sounds shady, but it’s a common newbie programming error when writing an app to request ALL PERMISSIONS because as a coder you get sick of running into walls and dead ends since you feel like you’re fumbling around in the networking code of someone else’s data. Think of it as the lazy man’s ā€œbring me the fridgeā€ when they just want a beer and they’re only going to grab the beer.

It could be bad, but it’s probably just lazy and that’s why we, as coders, love to put these lil guys (apps) in happy lil VMs (virtual machines) with their own baby Steam accounts and watch them for a few days to see what the Fanatical code is actually doing. I go out on a limb and declare it ā€œmostly harmlessā€ in the immortal words of Douglas Adams. Of course they should restrict their permissions to only what they need so feel free to give them a review saying as such, but as of now it looks fine. A tad lazy but fine.

TL;DR - go get a Computer Science degree or read my post you lazy bums

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While I agree with what you’re saying here…

If we get our tinfoil hats back on for a moment though. Even if it is fine right now, they can easily push out updates that makes it not fine later without most people even noticing.

There’s also the question about how useful this thing really is anyway. Kind of seems like a pointless tool to me that comes with real risk and a huge potential for abuse.

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Oh, I 100% agree, it could be abused. But if we reviewed the potential for everything I’d be giving carrots 1-Star reviews at the supermarket because I once saw a Guy Ritchie movie where they were used as lethal weapons. Literally.

I also agree it doesn’t help me much, but if you want to use it go ahead. It’s safe, zero malware, and harmless in its current state. Check back with me or any other coder after a major Fanatical patch, especially if you see permissions expanding or something raises a red flag. However, in its current state if you feel like using their new tool and it helps you, knock yourself out.
#NotPaid
#WillAcceptFoodDonations

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Including carrots?

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