Around a year ago I bought a refurbished thinkcentre from esm-computer.de and installed Linux Mint on it. I didn’t have any problems with it so far.

Exactly my thoughts. My microphone sound level always randomly reduces to a lower level. The only way I notice it is when people in voice chat tell me how quiet I am.

It might be there because there is a lot of data associated with the steam account, especially the community part of it, e.g.:

• Recorded playtimes
• Times and dates when you are regularly logged in
• Possession of games which are precisely tagged by genre/interests/etc.
• On which time and date you spent how much money (participation in sales in the steam store)
• Timestamped posts and comments in groups based on various interests etc.
• Curators/devs/publishers you follow
• Your game wishlist
• Connection and interaction with other steam accounts (friends list, chat, trades, gifts)

All this can be used to create a very detailed behaviour profile and accurately deduce the social status of the real person who uses the account. Maybe the data isn’t misused and it’s just there so the features can actually exist.

Personally, I doubt Valve actually does this as expansive and invasive as other big tech companies. I’m pretty sure they at least aggregate anonymised data to measure how e.g. their sales perform, which game to promote on the store front page etc.

But we can’t be sure because it’s not public.