Valve’s Family Sharing plan increases security

January 04, 2014

Valve hasn’t even released its Steam Family Sharing system to the community-at-large yet, but it’s already changing, according to a forum post Friday announcing an authorization limit of ten specific users on ten specific machines. Steam Family Sharing, currently in beta, is one of the most-anticipated changes to Valve’s digital games marketplace and a cornerstone of Valve’s upcoming SteamOS operating system. It allows users to share their digital library between multiple accounts—ostensibly so a household could buy the game once and then share it instead of buying a copy for each separate account. In practice, of course, anyone can access your Steam library from their machine as long as you’ve logged into your account on that computer and given permission: your friends, everyone in your college dorm, your creepy uncle, the person you’re having an affair with—whomever! The old method of Family Sharing authorization was on a per-computer basis. You’d log in to Steam on your [dad/mom/son/daughter/friend]’s computer, authorize it for Family Sharing, and then any account on that machine could access your games.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2084121/valve-s-family-sharing-plan-increases-security.html#tk.rss_all