Notch asks community for permission to track player data in Minecraft

Mojang's Notch is a smart guy, not only in game design terms but also when it comes to managing his company's 20 million or so Minecraft players. The designer has posted a poll on his personal blog to discover whether his cuboid constituents would feel comfortable with the company collecting various types of anonymous data from its players.

Currently, Mojang only tracks when a player logs into the game. Notch's proposal is to also track "non-private data" like gameplay-session length, your PC's OS type, whether you're playing in single or multiplayer mode and whether you're playing via the client or the web applet. The collected information would then be shared with the community, "as usual."

"Naturally, the data sent will be fully anonymous," said Notch. "So it wouldn't contain any session information or your user name, and it wouldn't send any sensitive information that you might not want to share." To be perfectly honest, we're fairly surprised this kind of data wasn't already being collected. If you're part of the Minecraft nation, you can let your voice be heard by voting for or against anonymous data collection here.