Honestly it's kind of hilarious. An indie game asks for a device detail or two so their ban or cheating system can function, and people act like their entire life just got sold at auction. Meanwhile every single one of us opens a browser, types an address, hits enter, and hands out way more than that without even thinking twice. Consider what actually happens the moment you load a webpage. Your IP address gets sent to the server, and honestly to a bunch of other servers too, since most pages are stitched together from ad networks, trackers, and CDNs you never agreed to individually. The domain you're visiting leaks out in plain text, not once but twice, first through the DNS lookup and then again through the TLS handshake's SNI field, so even your "secure" browsing is broadcasting where you're headed. Your browser hands over your OS and version automatically, no prompt, no consent screen, just baked into the user agent. Referrer headers tell the site exactly where you came from. Cookies and fingerprinting scripts from a dozen companies you've never heard of quietly build a profile of you using your screen size, your fonts, your timezone, your hardware quirks, precise enough to track you with zero cookies at all. That's the toll for reading a news article or checking the weather. Nobody blinks. Now compare that to a small indie multiplayer game's asking for something like your hardware ID or OS version so they can actually catch someone running cheats or breaking rules, and stop them from ruining it for everyone else. That's a handful of facts, collected for one specific purpose, by one dev, so the game stays fair. There's no invisible pipeline running in the background every second you're connected, no third party ad exchange getting a copy, no fingerprint being built while you sleep. One of these is a nonstop, mostly invisible data grab that the entire internet runs on by default. The other is a narrow, purpose built check so stuff get caught and dealt with. If we're going to get upset about privacy, maybe aim it at the thing actually deserving it.