The company wants to retain the trust of customers in the long term

Feb 7, 2013 07:41 GMT  ·  By

Video game developer Valve has quietly changed the structure of its Steam profile pages in order to eliminate a privacy problem, although the company has not revealed the exact nature of the breach and how users could have been affected.

Ars Technica discovered the problem, which involved URL manipulation and allowed an attacker to get access to profile data that was supposed to be private.

The site discussed the issue with Valve rather than going public with it and the company moved quickly to eliminate the problem by changing the structure of the user account system.

More details about the privacy breach are available on the Ars Technica site.

Steam is the biggest digital distribution service on the PC and a serious privacy or security breach linked to user accounts would drive customer trust down and might lead to lower overall sales of the company.