TL;DR - Sounds like some new terms of service were pushed out for ALL games in the Borderlands series (yes even the old ones) and there is some very heavy data harvesting language in there.

Not sure how the “spyware” is implemented (e.g. it didn’t say anything specific about keyloggers / kernel-level anticheat / rootkit / etc), so its possible this is just a language thing or they are harvesting from records on a server somewhere (e.g. if they sold a copy on steam, they might know some kind of details on people who bough it there, ditto for xbox live / etc). If anybody has more info on exactly how, please share, but I couldn’t find any hard details on that.

On a completely unrelated side note, does LAN Co-op generally still work in pirated games? I’m assuming based on this comment that it can at least for some games. Also, what cross-platform software do you guys use for “lan over the internet”? zerotier? something else? (looking for something that supports windows + linux, preferably open-source or at least free and that wont narc on me for playing pirated games)

edit: just to clarify. The article is calling it “spyware” not me - seems there were definitely some TOS changes but I am not sure if there is any softwaer cjhanges or not for anticheat etc. I had been thinking trying presequel and while trying to see what kinds of co-op it had, i saw “recent reviews:mostly negative” then found steam reviews like this one and other similar ones saying they were adding spyware/anticheat/etc and this article was the only think I found explaining it. if someone more knowledgable than me wants to weigh in, would love to have more info.