Privacy and Heartbeats
The public listing contract and the boundary around private server operations.
A heartbeat is a compact public advertisement of a server. It is not remote access; the Atlas never reaches into the beacon behind it.
aurora-smp
- Address
- play.example.net
- Players
- 24 / 40
- Region
- US East
Published data
When publishing is enabled, a beacon may send:
- Display identity, description, tags, region, and public URLs.
- Advertised Minecraft address and compatible server attributes.
- Sampled availability, online player count, and health signals like TPS and uptime for discovery surfaces.
- Only with their own opt-ins: the member roster, recent activity, and a small Vantage stream capability. Map assets are fetched directly from the beacon; Atlas does not receive or store them.
The Atlas can independently ping the advertised Minecraft address to corroborate public status.
Never published
The public heartbeat does not provide:
- Dashboard accounts, roles, allowlist entries, or invite codes.
- World files, backups, chat history, or audit history.
- RCON credentials, Docker access, privileged RPC capability, or server lifecycle controls.
- Exact player positions or other private in-world operational data.
- Vantage world files, tiles, texture arrays, or thumbnails. Those stay on the beacon even when the public stream is enabled.
Private control remains private
The public Atlas is an unprivileged directory. Administrative capability remains inside each independently operated beacon.
Disable publishing
Pausing from the beacon's Atlas dashboard stops subsequent heartbeats. The listing remains, but without fresh signal the directory ages it out of live availability.
If you run a beacon: your players' data is yours
A beacon runs on your infrastructure, under your control. The Atlas never reads your dashboard database, so the data your beacon keeps about players — Minecraft usernames and account IDs (UUIDs), chat, gameplay activity and statistics, map waypoints, connection and IP information — is collected and held by you, not by the Beacon project.
Your server, your responsibility
Beacon is software for hosting your own Minecraft server. We never see your players' data, so we can't manage or delete it for you — and we can't advise you on the laws that may apply to your community. Meeting whatever obligations apply to your server is up to you.