Steam Invisible Status Revealed: How to Know if They Are Really Offline
Tested Jan 2026. Confirmed working.
Setting yourself to "Offline" is basically a UI illusion. You might appear offline to the world, but the backend Connection Manager (CM) continues broadcasting your live activity to the socket.
This leak bypasses everything, even "Private Profile" settings. It essentially hands your friends a real-time log of exactly when you sleep and wake up, making your privacy settings effectively useless.
The Leak
The issue is in the ClientPersonaState protobuf message. Steam pushes two raw Unix timestamps to all your friends in real-time. It doesn't care if your status is set to Offline, Invisible, or if your profile is Private.
Here is the payload your friends' clients receive silently in the background:
// CM Socket Payload (Protobuf) "personas" : { "76561198000000000" : { // These timestamps are broadcast to friends in real-time // even if the user is set to "Offline" "last_logon" : 1770148823 , "last_logoff" : 1770134410 } }
Valve: "WontFix"
I sent this to Valve on HackerOne. I showed them how I could reconstruct a target's daily sleep cycles despite them being "Invisible" for weeks.
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