Vanguard, the controversial anti-cheat software initially attached to Valorant, is now also coming to League of Legends.
Summary:
The article discusses Riot Games’ requirement for players to install their Vanguard anti-cheat software, which runs at the kernel level, in order to play their games such as League of Legends and Valorant. The software aims to combat cheating by scanning for known vulnerabilities and blocking them, as well as monitoring for suspicious activity while the game is being played. However, the use of kernel-level software raises concerns about privacy and security, as it grants the company complete access to users’ devices.
The article highlights that Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that has been involved in censorship and surveillance activities in China. This raises concerns that Vanguard could potentially be used for similar purposes, such as monitoring players’ activity and restricting free speech in-game.
Ultimately, the decision to install Vanguard rests with players, but the article urges caution and encourages players to consider the potential risks and implications before doing so.
We totally won’t harvest your data.
Ignore the fact that we have political, state, and financial interest to do so, and that you would have no way of verifying or detecting if we did harvest your data, but you can trust us.
Just trust us.
It’s not only interests of the chinese government, they HAVE to oblige legally if they are asked to. So even if the company has the best intentions, the government overrules.
And don’t make that a chinese bad guy argument, as if western companies aren’t doing the same, they just don’t do that officially, which one is shadier is yours to decide.
All you can do as a company or anyone is to stop harvesting data and don’t plant blackboxes/backdoors in customers systems
Edward Snowden showed that the US is spying on their citicens but nobody seems to care. But when China is doing it, everybody seems to lose their mind.
I don’t get why they are so afraid of spyware from a country they don’t even live in, it’s the US that can prosecute you for anything they don’t like on your computer.
To be fair, China is far more authoritarian and evil than USA. Not that I’m comfortable with USA spying on me