Remote communication

This section elaborates on remote communication that ASF includes, including further explanation on how one can influence it. While we don't consider anything below as malicious or otherwise unwanted, and neither we're legally obliged to disclose it, we want you to better understand the program functionality especially in regards to your privacy and data being shared.

Steam

ASF communicates with Steam network (CM servers), as well as Steam API, Steam store and Steam community.

It's not possible to disable any of the above communication, as it's the core foundation ASF is based on in order to provide its basic functionality. You'll need to refrain from using ASF if you're not comfortable with the above.

Steam group

ASF communicates with our Steam group. The group provides you with announcements, especially new versions, critical issues, Steam problems and other things that are important to keep community updated. It also allows you to use our technical support, by asking questions, resolving problems, reporting issues or suggesting improvements. By default, accounts used in ASF will automatically join the group upon login.

You can decide to opt-out of joining the group by disabling SteamGroup flag in bot's RemoteCommunication settings.

GitHub

ASF communicates with GitHub's API in order to fetch ASF releases for the update functionality. This is done as part of auto-updates (if you've kept UpdatePeriod enabled), as well as update command. You can influence ASF's communication with GitHub through UpdateChannel property - setting it to None will result in disabling entire update functionality, including GitHub communication in this regard.

ASF's server

ASF communicates with our own server for more advanced functionality. In particular, this includes:

Verifying checksums of ASF builds downloaded from GitHub against our own independent database to ensure that all downloaded builds are legitimate (free of malware, MITM attacks or other tampering)
Fetching list of bad bots for filtering if you've kept FilterBadBots global config setting enabled.
Announcing your bot in our listing if you've enabled SteamTradeMatcher in TradingPreferences and meet other criteria
Downloading currently available bots to trade from our listing if you've enabled MatchActively in TradingPreferences and meet other criteria

As a security measure, it's not possible to disable checksum verification for ASF builds. However, you can disable auto-updates entirely if you'd like to avoid this, as described above in the GitHub section.

You can disable FilterBadBots setting if you want to avoid fetching the list from the server.

You can decide to opt-out of being announced in the listing by disabling PublicListing flag in bot's RemoteCommunication settings. This might be useful if you'd like to run SteamTradeMatcher bot without being announced at the same time.

Downloading bots from our listing is mandatory for MatchActively setting, you'll need to disable that setting if you're unwilling to accept that.