security!? surely that's satire?
Wasn't Win7 the best of what's still in use?
It's theater. The only real reason to drop Win7 support is because Valve got lazy and used Chromium as the core of the steam store, instead of writing their own like they used to. Chrome no longer supports Win7, therefore steam no longer supports Win7.
"Security" is as useful as "It's for the children!" It's like Element saying that Win7 is no longer a candidate for a secure messenger (but Win10, the privacy and telemetry nightmare is...)
I can understand that as Win7 ages and new vulnerabilities are found, you may want to consider dropping support - but steam is paranoid about accounts so they can just fuck off with their lazy ways.
web support
There is so much you can do from keeping away from upstream until you can't back port. Valve didn't throw win 7 support in the trash, Google did. Valve in it's conferences stated it has dragged it's heels with it's CEF to maintain its Asian market, which notoriously does not upgrade. In Google's case, it's a question of how much do you want to pay (money, time) to keep this old target viable.
Telemetry in the OS vs telemetry in the SasS.
I guess it's okay for Valve or New Vector Limited to collect your data rather than Microsoft?
Valve threw it in the trash by way of using someone else's platform - that of Google. Guilt by association here, which also goes to people like me who are still using Win7. I just decided that it was no longer worth it and closed the account.
As far as data collecting, no - it's not good for anyone to be doing that, but part of making a purchase from Valve is letting them know what you're buying it for. It's not an excuse, but it is part of how the purchase cycle of what they're selling works. You're forced to use their community, so if you want to make a purchase from them you get the baggage of community. That means they collect your playtime and what you're doing in the game to provide awards.
The OS has no such community, beyond collecting crash dumps there's nothing Windows needs from me other than to get out of the way. Any other data that gets sent back is purely unnecessary collection.
As far as element matrix goes, of course it's not privacy focused no matter how much they say it is. You're a fucking idiot if you think that and that's why it's not good for anything more that what we use it for here - posting memes and shit.
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