That is clearly a lie. It tracks your usage habits, for one thing. That's how it knows exactly how long and when you've been playing. Given that he has lied about this, it stands to reason that he also has lied about everything else.

That does not mean by itself that its spyware Sigmund , EA lancher and FUCKING STEAM do exactly the same thing ... of course STEAM is in fact spyware as it does record your activity and reports it back (Valve let that up slip when they started to talk about how long did people played HL and how many finished the game).

FAILshop likely just connects to the interwebs in order to throw those TSR ads that were reported (the Launcher does the same thing).

Steam does not harvest or store any information about the user aside from the password on your computer(if you click the "Remember me" box, and the game files.

It is a clownfish of sorts:

Yes. It's also buried in the Shift-CLICK only options and comes with a warning box saying not to use it. Let me guess, despite all the obstacles involved in finding it, you pushed the button anyway?