How to hide your activity on Steam

When you play games on Steam, you have to first create an account, install the app, and then use the account you created to download games. It’s fairly simple stuff but your account comes with a social aspect as well. Most information, by default, is public which means information about when you last played a game (aka when you were last active on Steam) is public, among other things. It also gives other users who visit your profile information about which games you play, and other aliases that you’ve used in the past. Here’s how you can hide your activity on Steam as well as hide personal information.

Hide Steam activity

You can hide your activity on Steam by changing the privacy settings. This can be done by accessing the Steam website via any web browser, or you can do it via the Steam app installed on your system.

On the Steam app, click your profile at the top right and select View My Profile from the menu. The profile page has a ‘My Privacy Settings’ option. Click it and you will see all the items that you can change the visibility for.

These items are; your profile, game details, friends list, and inventory. Your profile is the main header so if you set it to private, everything else that’s under it i.e., game details, friends list, and inventory will also be set to private. You can keep your profile public and set these items to private individually.

This will make it so that any description that you’ve entered with your profile, and your profile picture remain public but everything else will be hidden.

Once you change these settings, it’s a good idea to also click the Edit Profile button next to your profile picture. On the edit profile screen, you will see a field for which country you reside in. You can choose to limit the audience for this information as well.

You will find these same settings on the Steam web interface. Click your profile icon at the top right and go to your profile to make the same changes there.

Your Steam activity isn’t exactly the same as say, a phone number but if you keep it all public, you may still give away how often you play and even when you play. The kinds of games you play might also invite unwanted attention and opinions either in your personal life or your gaming life.

Like most privacy controls, you can choose to hide everything from everyone, or just hide it from those you’re not friends with.

Read How to hide your activity on Steam by Fatima Wahab on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter