Privacy? Best way to go about this for players?
Hello, I've been wanting to make a Minecraft server for awhile but I am unsure on how to go about privacy for players.
I want to reduce Mojang/Microsoft data collection and also reduce potential data collection in plugins.
What methods can I go about this?
10 Replies
Not sure if this is relevant, but maybe disable bStats and install AntiPopup (https://modrinth.com/plugin/antipopup) to remove chat reporting..
bstats doesnt reveal anything about the players themselves, at most its just the count of players on your server at the time
most plugins dont tend to collect stats about the players themselves either. something you can do is disable player lists in the server browser on the client, i think the setting is in the server.properties file
that just helps out against server scanners so they cant tell who is on the server at the time
disabling popups and player reporting is a decent shout which tinnyfusion provided a link to 1 of the many plugins that do exactly that
if you wanna see what bstats actually saves then you can see it here https://bstats.org/
bStats - Plugin Metrics made with <3
bStats collects data for plugin authors. It's free and easy to use!
Do you mean setting
hide-online-players=false to true in the server.properties?yes exactly that
just means server scanners cannot pickup on that data when scanning all possible ipv4 addresses and ports
Isn't this useful information for your other members though? Besides, if the server is in online mode and whitelisted then no one can join that is unauthorised anyway so the bots can scan away as all they will get is a list of usernames if I understand it.
These usernames can be obtained from lots of different sources besides the server(s) they play on.
that depends on the owner, they havent specified if they want a private server with whitelist and that, or if they want a public server. they just said they wanted to reduce/prevent data collection by other sources such as mojang, microsoft, etc. disabling player name list on hoving the player count in the server browser prevents the vast majority of server scanners due to the fact they are mostly just cracked accounts attempting to join
sure the usernames can be obtained from elsewhere, but should help reduce whats able to link the players to the server
Fair play.
I'm wondering now though that if a server is connected to DiscordSRV and you have a bot to show online players/sync ranks - will disabling this setting affect that?
like at the end of the day its up to the OP waht they want to do, im just trying to suggest and also try to inform them of what i know what stuff is gunna beable to collect data and what type of data
discordsrv is a plugin which pulls directly, it doesnt use the serverlistping packet to get current players online
so enabling hide-online-players shouldnt effect discordsrv doing its thing
I've never thought about this until seeing this post - thanks for the info.