Valve CEO Gabe Newell has denied claims that the company's latest anti-cheating system collects the browser histories of users.

Newell addressed users after a Reddit thread claimed that the Valve Anti-Cheat (or VAC) system records the a user's browser history and sends it back to Valve. Speaking in his own Reddit post, Newell clarified what the Valve Anti-Cheat program does and what specifically the program looks for when activated.

"There are a number of kernel-level paid cheats that relate to this Reddit thread. Cheat developers have a problem in getting cheaters to actually pay them for all the obvious reasons, so they start creating DRM and anti-cheat code for their cheats," Newell wrote. "These cheats phone home to a DRM server that confirms that a cheater has actually paid to use the cheat."

"VAC checked for the presence of these cheats. If they were detected VAC then checked to see which cheat DRM server was being contacted. This second check was done by looking for a partial match to those (non-web) cheat DRM servers in the DNS cache. If found, then hashes of the matching DNS entries were sent to the VAC servers. The match was double checked on our servers and then that client was marked for a future ban. Less than a tenth of one percent of clients triggered the second check. 570 cheaters are being banned as a result," Newell added.

The head of Valve also stated that the program does not send the browser history of users to the company. Valve does not care what websites users have visited recently, he said. Newell said he believes such rumors were started by those interested in the "social engineering" part of cheating that seeks to foster distrust in big companies so more people are fine with cheating in games. He also announced that the VAC program in question is no longer active.

"Cheat versus trust is an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. New cheats are created all the time, detected, banned, and tweaked. This specific VAC test for this specific round of cheats was effective for 13 days, which is fairly typical," Newell revealed. "It is now no longer active as the cheat providers have worked around it by manipulating the DNS cache of their customers' client machines."