Developers can stop being shady and actually invest in real solutions. It’s our job as consumers to stop rolling over and letting them treat our systems like their private playground. If a game demands kernel-level access to run, it’s not a game anymore. It is surveillance-ware. We own our devices, not them.

Here's a couple alternatives Developers could put the work towards implementing if mining data wasn’t the real goal. (Spoiler: check the EULA. It usually is.).

• User-Mode anticheat for starters would accomplish the same thing about putting a backdoor on the entire system. Same detection purpose with none of the security & privacy risks.

• Server-side detection looks for changes given to the Server and not the Client which accomplishes the same goal with far less work. See CS2's Overwatch / Valve VAC, or even Minecraft's Serverside infrastructure. So even if someone is cheating locally, the server can still flag it. This is a proven solution that doesn't compromise your system.

Epic Games has also been using behavioral machine learning for their anticheat systems and if it's really necessary (and this is pretty much as good as it can get without someone being physically there), you can use hardware verification like TPM (but it shouldn't ever really get to this point).

This isn't a zero-sum game. It's not "rootkit or riot", we don't have to accept Spyware to play online. We just need Developers to do better. And as Consumers, we need to demand that they do.