Security concerns

[u/Prestigious_Wolf897]

Concerning Steamlink.. my son lives primarily with his father but will be with me most of the summer. He has a steam account on the computer that is at my house and now he wants to play at his dad's. They want to use his dad's chromebook which I guess will not download steam but can download the steamlink. They kept discussing around me that he was going to bring the chromebook over to link it. I said absolutely not..I am not having his dad's chromebook linked to my computer. Am I wrong? I think this is very much a privacy issue.?

[u/Aeroswoot]

It's only a privacy issue if there's malicious intent, such as a program installed for the express purpose of stealing data or violating privacy. Given that it's your son that just wants to play games, I dont believe there's anything nefarious happening here. Steamlink itself does nothing like this, it just acts as a bridge to use the computing power of the home PC to stream a game to a different device.

If anything, have a conversation about when they should use this feature. If it is your computer, and you plan to be using it while they are gaming, then Steamlink would interrupt your activities. Try to ask them to be mindful of when you have business to attend to, and they would appreciate it if you were also mindful of the times they'd like to play a game with each other.

Out of curiosity, what about this situation makes you think that there's a privacy violation?

[u/Prestigious_Wolf897 → u/Aeroswoot]

My main concern is he wants to link his dad's laptop to my computer.  There are a lot of boundary issues from my ex and I cannot have him having access to my computer 

[u/virrk → u/Prestigious_Wolf897]

Don't give him access.

Steamlink gives full control of whatever account steam is running under. It links to the login of that specific instance of Steam and gives full control. I've run Steamlink on my Chromebook to play games and to get full access to my remote Windows machine. I've also used the hardware based steamlink, and the android steamlink on a phone. They all give full access to the account Steam is running under.

While it is technically possible to create a secure user that only has access to steam and then link to ONLY that user, it is not straight forward. Securing a Windows desktop is not a minor undertaking and takes ongoing maintenance, especially staying on top of security update and required mitigations for security issues.

As others suggested, try GeForceNow from Nvidia (GFN) https://play.geforcenow.com You cannot buy games in GFN, it simply runs games you have bought in from Steam or elsewhere (fully list of games here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/ ) There is a free tier to see if the internet connection is good enough to stream the games but you an only play for like an hour at a time. Works on Chromebooks, certain TVs, Windows Desktops and laptops, Macs, phones, Linux, pretty any computer. There is a subreddit for GFN you can ask questions in to understand more, what limits are, options for membership levels, figuring out if it works, etc.

[u/figmentPez → u/Aeroswoot]

Out of curiosity, what about this situation makes you think that there's a privacy violation?

Presumably OP does not trust their ex, and does not want their computer to be accessed by them.

[u/JakeyJake3 → u/Aeroswoot]

Steam link is intended for that, but can be used for anything remote-desktop related that doesn't require admin rights.

As long as he has his own Windows user login and Steam login local to that Windows user, and that's where steam link is linked, it should be okay, given that OP has anything outside of steam put in their user folder or otherwise locked folders.

Aside from that, Parsec has the ability to share a host connection with friends, and the host PC can set app restrictions to remote users. That's probably a more applicable solution here rather than Steam Link, where the only accessible apps through the remote connection would be steam and any downloaded games, should OP set it up that way.