It's official Parsers are illegal in FFXIV

[Caitlyn]

ACT hooks into the FF14 process and then it reads informations directly from the memory claimed by the FF14 process. It can read literary every information which is stored in the FF14 process. Not only your combat log but propably also things like your character data and maybe your login credentials.

For me it is way too risky to allow such things to a third-party-tool. It is really strange that SE doesn't use a protection to prevent this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_i6mjiGerU

That is actually not true. Like Yoshi-P said, it just reads the combat log and adding the numbers. You can do that by yourself using a calculator (which may take a few hours).
Sorry to say this, but you fear something you dont understand.

Login credentials cant be read, because they are used within the launcher and are not stored inside the game. Almost the same goes with the character data, but you will find such data easily on your lodestone page ; )

And why should SE make a protection against ACT? And how?
Adding a protection may cause huge installation or compatibility issues. Also, you have to add a protection against ANY third party software. And you may lose a big part of your playerbase.

[Ronduwil]

That is actually not true. Like Yoshi-P said, it just reads the combat log and adding the numbers. You can do that by yourself using a calculator (which may take a few hours).
Sorry to say this, but you fear something you dont understand.

Yoshi-P was speaking hypothetically. As in, "suppose it behaves just like an excel spreadsheet..." He wasn't making any statements about its inner workings. Tom Richter says otherwise at https://gist.github.com/TomRichter/e...514ffb20a201a9:

ACT should always be run as Administrator and excepted from Windows Firewall to make sure it works properly. This is because ACT uses memory reading and packet inspection to collect accurate data, which Windows doesn't allow by default.

I consider the ACT FFXIV plugin programmer's statement to be more authoritative than Yoshi-P's hypotheticals in this regard.

Login credentials cant be read, because they are used within the launcher and are not stored inside the game. Almost the same goes with the character data, but you will find such data easily on your lodestone page ; )

Except that they can be read because ACT is not running inside the game. It's running as a separate program that, if you followed the installation instructions, has been granted Windows Administrator privileges. That gives the program the ability to look at everything you're typing while it's running, including FFXIV login credentials, banking credentials, your gmail credentials, and any other bit of data that you send across the network while ACT is running.

And why should SE make a protection against ACT? And how?

They can't, and that's why they don't. They've already protected you by telling you not to install third party programs. WoW supports addons only when they run inside of their own proprietary LUA engine. That's how they can control what the program can and can't do. SE's stance is completely different. If there's functionality that you're lacking, they build it into the game themselves instead of relying on third parties to add it. ACT functionality is something that they've deemed to be detrimental to the game's social experience, so they refuse to build it in. You're using these third party programs at your own risk.