Notch asks permission to spy on your Minecraft habits

Minecraft creator Marcus 'Notch' Persson has asked for gamers' permission to mine "non-private" player data from his hugely successful indie title.

Writing in a post on his personal blog, Notch explained that he wanted to study how people are playing the game, with a view to potentially adding some kind of player tracking feature.

"This would work by having the game connect to minecraft.net and send some anonymous and non-private data about the game, such as current game mode (single player, multiplayer), operating system (windows? mac?), how long you've been playing for (so we know how long a game session is), and whether or not you're playing the downloaded game, or the applet on the webpage," he wrote.

"It would probably connect every ten minutes or so so we can get some semi-realtime data. We'd share the data with the community, as usual.

"Naturally, the data sent will be fully anonymous, 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."

He then put it to a public vote, with around 86 per cent of respondents giving the idea the thumbs up at the time of writing.