Privacy Policy

1. Controller

No data protection officer has been appointed; the requirements of § 38 BDSG (German Federal Data Protection Act) are not met.

2. Visiting the website

When the website is visited, the hosting provider processes technically necessary connection data, in particular IP address, time, requested resource, amount of data transferred, referrer and browser and operating system information. The processing serves secure and error-free delivery on the basis of Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.

Hosting: IONOS SE, Elgendorfer Str. 57, 56410 Montabaur, Germany, on a server in Germany. The domain and DNS are also managed via IONOS. Web server access logs are rotated automatically and deleted after 14 days.

The public information page uses no analytics, marketing or third-party cookies and loads fonts and media locally.

3. Account area on the website

The account area at /en/account.html shows the same data as the application. For signing in, an access token and a refresh token are stored in the browser's session storage. They are technically necessary so that a sign-in persists across page changes, are not used for analytics and are deleted when the tab is closed. Consent under § 25(1) TDDDG is not required for this (§ 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG).

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (performance of the contract of use).

4. Agreement to the Terms of Use

At registration we store when and to which version of the Terms of Use and this Privacy Policy consent was given. This information serves solely as proof that the contract was concluded.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR and our legitimate interest in being able to prove this under Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. The information is deleted together with the account.

5. Bug reports

A message can be sent to us via “Send feedback” in the application. If expressly requested, system checks and the last lines of the application log are sent along; these can contain local paths and world names. Attaching them can be deselected, and this is pointed out before sending.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (interest in fixing errors). Bug reports are deleted no later than 12 months after they have been dealt with.

6. Audience measurement

No audience measurement currently takes place. No analytics or marketing cookies are set, no tracking pixels are embedded and no profiling takes place. The website does load a file prepared for this purpose, but it is delivered without a configured server and without an identifier, and in this state it makes no connection and stores nothing.

Should we activate measurement, this will be done with an instance of the open-source software Umami operated by us on a server in the EU: without cookies, without cross-device identifiers, without transfer to third parties and without storing IP addresses. Only aggregated information such as the page visited, referrer, approximate region of origin and device type would be recorded. The legal basis would be Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; since no information would be stored on or read from the device, no consent under § 25 TDDDG would be required. The browser's Do Not Track signal would be respected. This policy will be updated accordingly before any activation.

7. Account and collaboration

For registration, sign-in and collaboration we process username, email address, password hash, MFA status, session and security data as well as roles, friendships, groups and invites, and also the chosen plan, plan changes, cloud credit and the related billing events. The processing is necessary to provide the requested service and for pre-contractual measures, Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. We process security logs on the basis of Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.

A Minecraft name can optionally be stored in the settings of the desktop client. We do not check whether this name actually belongs to you. The name is stored and shown to accepted friends and members of shared worlds so that the client can show your Minecraft skin head there; open friend requests do not see it. The legal basis is your consent, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR. You can withdraw it at any time by clearing the field and saving; the name is then deleted immediately, and also when the account is deleted.

Through “Invite a friend”, the owner or an admin of a world can create an invite link. For this we store only a check value (hash) of the code it contains, the world, the inviting account, the time of creation and expiry, the number of permitted uses and which account redeemed the link and when. The code sits in the part of the link after the “#”, which the browser does not send to our server when the website is opened. Whoever redeems the link becomes friends with the inviting account and a member of the world; both see each other's username, and the invited person sees the world's name before redeeming. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. Invites are deleted with the world or the inviting account, the record of a redemption with the redeeming account.

To understand where new users get stuck when they start, we store for each account when it first reached certain steps: first world created, first invite sent, first friend in one of its own worlds, first session with two players and first session hosted by another member. Only the step and the time are stored; the information comes from operations the service processes anyway. We evaluate it only in aggregate (counts per step and per week of registration), only the operator sees this evaluation, and it is not passed on to third parties. The information is deleted with the account. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in improving how people get started with the service, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; you can object to this under Art. 21 GDPR. An email to the address given in section 1 is enough. We then delete the steps stored for your account and record no further ones.

Account data is generally kept until the account is deleted. After an account is deleted, the associated world data is removed within 30 days (§ 12(4) of the Terms of Use); an export can be requested within this period. Statutory documentation and retention obligations as well as open security or billing matters may require longer, purpose-bound storage of individual records.

8. Worlds, backups and game operation

World Sync Play stores world files, file hashes, versions, commit messages, backup states, world memberships and technical synchronisation data. Minecraft worlds themselves can contain player UUIDs, inventories, progress and other content created by the players. Permitted members of the respective world get access according to their role. If you save game settings or mod lists as your own configuration, we store them under the name you choose with your account so that you can apply them to other worlds. Only you can see them; they are deleted when you remove them or delete your account.

The processing takes place for synchronisation, restoration and running the game on the basis of Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. World data is transferred encrypted and stored in the S3-compatible Cloudflare R2 object storage. Older world states are deleted automatically when they meet all three conditions: they are not among the newest 30 states of the world, they are older than 30 days, and no member has pinned them. A world's current state and states needed for an upload or restore in progress are also kept. Files that are no longer referenced afterwards are removed from the object storage. The rule is the same for all plans.

If a locally hosted server crashes or does not start, the app sends the last lines of the server console to us, as long as the setting “Error excerpt after crashes” is on, which is the default. Before sending, IP addresses, e-mail addresses and user names in file paths are blanked out; player and world names from the console may be included. We use the excerpt only to find and fix the problem. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in stable operation, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. The excerpt is visible to the operator only and is deleted after 30 days, as well as with the account or the world. The setting can be switched off in the app under “Settings”; nothing is sent then. For servers in the cloud the console lines are with us anyway.

9. Local hosting, cloud hosting and relays

For starting servers, the fixed join address and connection forwarding we process world ID, host account, session times, server status, ports, relay and cloud region, error and trace IDs and, temporarily, network addresses. The standard relay runs on our server at IONOS SE in Germany. On-demand cloud servers and additional relays that are added automatically are operated by Hetzner Online GmbH in Germany or the EU. For connections in North America we also operate a relay at InterServer, Inc. in the USA (data centre in New Jersey).

Which relay a session runs through depends on the connection quality the host measures to the available regions, or on the region the owner has set for the world. If a session runs through the relay in the USA, the IP addresses of the host and of the connected players, the time and duration of the connections, ports and amounts of data transferred are processed there. The game traffic is passed through; technically visible in the process is also the information transmitted unencrypted when a connection is set up, in particular the Minecraft name and the requested join address. So that a world can be reached through the nearest relay, its join address may point to the IP address of the relay in use by means of a DNS record.

Players' source IP addresses are processed technically for the connection, but are not stored in product telemetry as an analytics history. Security and access logs of the upstream infrastructure can contain network addresses for a limited time; their exact period is still to be confirmed. Technical logs of the relay software on the relays at Hetzner and InterServer can contain network addresses and are deleted automatically after 7 days at most. For capacity planning, only rough region, pseudonymised player identifier, latency, amount of data, CPU, RAM, TPS/MSPT and error status are stored. Telemetry data is currently deleted after 30 days. The legal bases are Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR.

10. Recipients and service providers

• IONOS SE, Elgendorfer Str. 57, 56410 Montabaur, Germany: domain, DNS, website and backend/VPS hosting, including the standard relay. Processing takes place in the EU or EEA.
• Cloudflare, Inc., USA: R2 object storage for world data and backups. Processing in third countries, in particular the USA, cannot be completely ruled out; it is based on Cloudflare's data processing agreement including the EU standard contractual clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR).
• Hetzner Online GmbH, Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen, Germany: on-demand cloud game servers and additional relays that are added automatically. We only use locations in the EU; according to the data processing agreement, processing takes place only in the EU or EEA.
• InterServer, Inc., PO Box 1707, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632, USA: operation of the relay for connections in North America in a data centre in New Jersey. The connection data named in section 9 is processed, in particular the IP addresses of hosts and players. The transfer to the USA is based on the EU standard contractual clauses provided for in InterServer's data processing agreement (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR). InterServer is also certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, for which there is an adequacy decision of the European Commission (Art. 45 GDPR); as the certification, according to its register entry, mainly concerns InterServer's own customer data, we do not rely on it alone for the data on the relay.
• Discord Inc. and Healthchecks.io: operational alerting. Only system states (such as database, storage, backups, load) and cost totals are transmitted, no data about users, players or world content.
• SMTP2GO (Sand Dune Mail Limited, 96-106 Manchester Street, Christchurch 8011, New Zealand): sending account and security emails, in particular password resets. The recipient's email address, the message content and delivery logs are processed. Sending runs through the provider's EU infrastructure. Under its data processing agreement, SMTP2GO also processes delivery logs partly as an independent controller, for example to prevent abuse and fraud. New Zealand is recognised by the European Commission as a country with an adequate level of data protection (most recently confirmed in the review of January 2024), so the transfer is based on an adequacy decision (Art. 45 GDPR) and no additional safeguards such as standard contractual clauses are required; onward transfers are covered by the standard contractual clauses agreed in the contract. Unlike with other providers we checked, no tracking pixels or unsubscribe headers are inserted into these emails.
• GitHub, Inc., USA: building the Windows installer via GitHub Actions. No data about users is processed in doing so; client updates are delivered from our own server.

When Minecraft, Paper, Modrinth or Java artefacts are downloaded, connections to Mojang/Microsoft, PaperMC, Modrinth and Eclipse Adoptium can arise. For a world's preview image, the client downloads the BlueMap program once from GitHub (GitHub, Inc., USA) and stores it locally; in doing so, GitHub receives your device's IP address. These requests go directly from your device to the respective provider, which acts as an independent controller. The Java download to be managed by World Sync Play in future is meant to be provided through a verified, immutable runtime catalogue.

For Terraria worlds, the client downloads the Terraria server once from terraria.org (Re-Logic, Inc., USA); in doing so, Re-Logic receives your device's IP address. For Project Zomboid worlds, the client downloads the SteamCMD program and, through it, the Project Zomboid server from Steam, a service of Valve Corporation (USA); no Steam account of your own is needed, and Valve receives your device's IP address. A running Project Zomboid server signs in to Steam as a game server without an account, downloads the Steam Workshop content listed for the world and uses Steam's services to sign players in. In doing so, Valve receives the public IP address of the internet connection the server runs on, as well as the server's name and player count. Players sign in to the game with their own Steam account; this happens between the game and Valve, not through World Sync Play. For other games whose servers are provided through Steam (Valheim, Satisfactory, Palworld, 7 Days to Die), the client downloads the server the same way through SteamCMD; for Factorio worlds it downloads the server from factorio.com (Wube Software, Czech Republic). These connections go directly from the respective device to the provider, which acts as an independent controller; processing in the USA is possible. When a world runs on one of our cloud servers, it is that server's address rather than yours. When you add Steam Workshop content to a world, our server retrieves its public details (title, size, description, last update) through Steam's public programming interface or, for unlisted collections, from their Workshop page; we only transmit the content identifiers, no data about you. When a world starts, the client also asks Steam directly whether Workshop content was updated; Valve receives the device's IP address in doing so. We store the selected content and settings with the world.

When the client shows skin heads (for yourself, for friends or for members of a world who have stored a Minecraft name), it retrieves the respective Minecraft name, the associated profile and the skin image directly from Mojang AB or Microsoft Corporation (api.mojang.com, sessionserver.mojang.com, textures.minecraft.net). In doing so, Mojang/Microsoft receives your device's IP address and the requested name; processing in the USA cannot be ruled out. The request does not go through our servers. The client caches results locally for at most 24 hours to avoid repeated requests. If nobody in your friends or world list has stored a Minecraft name, no such request takes place; a locally generated placeholder image is shown instead of a skin.

Data processing agreements under Art. 28 GDPR are in place with IONOS SE, Hetzner Online GmbH, Cloudflare, Inc., InterServer, Inc. and SMTP2GO (Sand Dune Mail Limited). Transfers to third countries are based on the EU standard contractual clauses for Cloudflare, on the EU standard contractual clauses for InterServer, which is additionally certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and on the adequacy decision for New Zealand for SMTP2GO, supplemented by standard contractual clauses for onward transfers.

11. Minors

The Service is intended for people aged 16 and over (§ 3 of the Terms of Use). People between 7 and 16 may only use the Service with the consent of their parents or guardians; they are responsible for the use and can withdraw the consent at any time. Purchases are only offered to adult accounts or their parents or guardians. The legal basis of the consent is Art. 8 GDPR, which sets the German age limit for one's own consent to processing by information society services at 16.

This function has not been implemented yet. Until a verifiable consent and purchase authorisation process exists, early access is limited to adult participants.

12. Rights of data subjects

Under the GDPR, data subjects have in particular the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, data portability and objection. Consent given can be withdrawn at any time with effect for the future. Requests can be sent to the email address above.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Bavarian Data Protection Authority (Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht), Promenade 18, 91522 Ansbach, Germany, www.lda.bayern.de, or with the supervisory authority of your country of residence.

13. Security and changes

Among other things, we use transport encryption, role-based access, MFA for administrative accounts, signed updates, versioned data, backups and limited log retention. This policy is updated when functions, service providers or legal bases change.