Sources:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-ministry-orders-38-apps-rectify-excessive-collection-personal-data-2021-11-03/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/08/tencent-wechat-surveillance-help-censorship-in-china.html
Background:
Cheating in video games is prevalent in many genres and from low levels of play all the way to professional leagues. Each video game has their own way of combating the problem, some better than others. FPS games in particular have been plagued due to their ease of coding and the many ways to get past cheat detection software. Valorant is an FPS game made by Riot Games who is owned by Tencent, a chinese company, that introduced a unique anti-cheat program called Vanguard. Vanguard works differently than other anti-cheats in the way it operates. Most anti-cheat programs are ran when you start the game and will continue to run until it is closed. Vanguard works differently because it is running from the moment you start your computer until the moment you shut it off. It works this way because it requires something called kernel-level access to your computer. This allows it to have full control over all the processes and data your computer handles. It has had a surprising amount of success. Whereas other FPS games are still plagued by cheaters daily, any who wish to befoul the competitive or casual scene in Valorant are caught nearly immediately. There have been many instances in which a player will decide to start cheating in a match and get caught and permanently banned by the end of it. Counter-Strike is Valorants leading competitor in the market and it is a night and day difference in the presence of cheaters. Seeing somebody hack in Counter-Strike is almost expected and not a surprise to any, but in Valorant it is such a rare occurrence that you could easily play 100 matches or more without encountering a single one. While it clearly has it's pros it has its cons as well. The fact that it has such a high level of access to your computer is scary to many computer science experts who know the extent of control it has. It's made all the more scary when looked at the history Tencent has with data collection in their other apps. They were ordered by the Chinese government on Nov 3 2021 (Horwitz, 1) to "rectify what it called the excessive collection of personal information"(Horwitz, 1). An investigation by a research company showed that they surveil foreign users on their messaging app WeChat which has over 1 billion users globally and is the largest messaging app in China where Tencent operates (Kharpal, 2). The investigation found that when "politically sensitive content which was sent exclusively between non-China-registered accounts was identified as politically sensitive and subsequently censored when transmitted between China-registered accounts, without having previously been sent to, or between, China-registered accounts,"(Kharpal, 11). Seeing what kind of actions they take in their other programs it's not hard to imagine what they might be doing with unprecedented access to 22.5 million active monthly players.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-ministry-orders-38-apps-rectify-excessive-collection-personal-data-2021-11-03/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/08/tencent-wechat-surveillance-help-censorship-in-china.html
Background:
Cheating in video games is prevalent in many genres and from low levels of play all the way to professional leagues. Each video game has their own way of combating the problem, some better than others. FPS games in particular have been plagued due to their ease of coding and the many ways to get past cheat detection software. Valorant is an FPS game made by Riot Games who is owned by Tencent, a chinese company, that introduced a unique anti-cheat program called Vanguard. Vanguard works differently than other anti-cheats in the way it operates. Most anti-cheat programs are ran when you start the game and will continue to run until it is closed. Vanguard works differently because it is running from the moment you start your computer until the moment you shut it off. It works this way because it requires something called kernel-level access to your computer. This allows it to have full control over all the processes and data your computer handles. It has had a surprising amount of success. Whereas other FPS games are still plagued by cheaters daily, any who wish to befoul the competitive or casual scene in Valorant are caught nearly immediately. There have been many instances in which a player will decide to start cheating in a match and get caught and permanently banned by the end of it. Counter-Strike is Valorants leading competitor in the market and it is a night and day difference in the presence of cheaters. Seeing somebody hack in Counter-Strike is almost expected and not a surprise to any, but in Valorant it is such a rare occurrence that you could easily play 100 matches or more without encountering a single one. While it clearly has it's pros it has its cons as well. The fact that it has such a high level of access to your computer is scary to many computer science experts who know the extent of control it has. It's made all the more scary when looked at the history Tencent has with data collection in their other apps. They were ordered by the Chinese government on Nov 3 2021 (Horwitz, 1) to "rectify what it called the excessive collection of personal information"(Horwitz, 1). An investigation by a research company showed that they surveil foreign users on their messaging app WeChat which has over 1 billion users globally and is the largest messaging app in China where Tencent operates (Kharpal, 2). The investigation found that when "politically sensitive content which was sent exclusively between non-China-registered accounts was identified as politically sensitive and subsequently censored when transmitted between China-registered accounts, without having previously been sent to, or between, China-registered accounts,"(Kharpal, 11). Seeing what kind of actions they take in their other programs it's not hard to imagine what they might be doing with unprecedented access to 22.5 million active monthly players.