Steam has been actively censoring links to MEGA – a popular cloud storage service – and preventing users from sharing MEGA URLs in Steam chats or forums. All links that directed to the cloud-service were automatically taken down because Steam believed MEGA links to be potentially “malicious” for its users.
Steam has more than 150 million users and its chat service is used daily by gamers to get in touch with their friends. Moreover, its forums are actively used and many users post links to cloud services to share images, videos, and files.
MEGA links were replaced by a {LINK REMOVED} text in both private messages and forums. Instead of seeing the link in their messages, the recipients got a {LINK REMOVED} text in its place.
“Potentially Malicious”
MEGA, a New Zealand-based company, started out in 2013 and has been providing encrypted data storage for all of its users. The company has always made sure that user data is free of malware and now caters to 40 billion encrypted files posted by 100 million registered users.
Steam does not allow some notably malicious and unregulated websites such as Piratebay and 4shared. Other than these two, game-oriented websites such as Metjm and Cheathappens are also censored in forums and chats.
Chairman’s Statement
MEGA’s Chairman, Stephen Hall says that the company gets rid of malicious content and actively removes such links before they are shared.
It is crazy for sites to block Mega links as we respond very quickly to disable any links that are reported as malware, generally much quicker than our competitors.
MEGA is well-reputed for providing good storage capacities for cheap and is much faster than most cloud services. Steam censoring it for being “malicious” was quite odd and raised many eyebrows.
Note: According to TorrentFreak, Steam has lifted the ban for now and links from both forums and personal chats are being allowed.
