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If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 346 posts

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#62
post #22

How do I opt out of this for my own private repos? I don't see anything related to this as I've got a ton of settings for Copilot itself (I have access to Copilot through my work org)

Under privacy. > Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training

I don't see it there, but I do see it in screenshots online. Maybe it was removed or moved.

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#63

No we won’t. Details here https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi... For users of Free, Pro and Pro+ Copilot, if you don’t opt out then we will start collecting usage data of Copilot for use in model training. If you are a subscriber for Business or Pro we do not train on usage. The blog post covers more details but we do not train on private repo data at rest, just interaction data with Copilot.…

Yes you do? If a user uses any form of copilot in one of his repos except ofc enterprise, says so right in the blog post. These aktshually corporate technicality defense posts aren’t helping, they just end up making you personally look a bit fishy.

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#64

No we won’t. Details here https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi... For users of Free, Pro and Pro+ Copilot, if you don’t opt out then we will start collecting usage data of Copilot for use in model training. If you are a subscriber for Business or Pro we do not train on usage. The blog post covers more details but we do not train on private repo data at rest, just interaction data with Copilot.…

Thanks for confirming you train on our data

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#65

Jokes on them, my private repos are total dog dookie. If nobody but me can see the code then I don't have to worry about style, structure, comments, or any other best practices. You don't want an LLM trained on my private repos. Trust me.

I will join the club. +1 for ruining M$ AI with my garbage code

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#66

I wonder how effective it would be to sabotage the training by publishing deliberately bad code. A FizzBuzz with O(n^2) complexity. A function named "quicksort" that actually implements bogosort. A "filter_xss" function that's a no-op or just does something else entirely. The possibilities are endless. I thought of this after remembering seeing a post a couple months ago about how it doesn't take a significant amount…

Probably extremely ineffective, it's an issue of scale and unless you really automate the terrible code generation and somehow manage to make it distinct enough in style that it isn't easy to detect and eliminate wholesale then you just won't have the volume to significantly impact the result set.

I'm absolutely sure that there are state actors with gigantic budgets that are putting a lot of effort into similar attacks, though.

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#67

No we won’t. Details here https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi... For users of Free, Pro and Pro+ Copilot, if you don’t opt out then we will start collecting usage data of Copilot for use in model training. If you are a subscriber for Business or Pro we do not train on usage. The blog post covers more details but we do not train on private repo data at rest, just interaction data with Copilot.…

It's unnecessarily splitting hairs.

> interaction data—specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context [...] will be used to train and improve our AI models

So using Copilot in a private repo, where lots of that repo will be used as context for Copilot, means GitHub will be using your private repo as training data when they were not before.

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#69
post #17
post #12

I've been saying this since 2023 > If your data is stored in a database that a company can freely read and access (i.e. not end-to-end encrypted), the company will eventually update their ToS so they can use your data for AI training — the incentives are too strong to resist https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37124188

Edit: Okay, sounds like you guys are pissed to the point where it seems like the pro tip here is to stop using GitHub. Pro tip: sign up for the business/enterprise version when reasonable in price. I do this with Google Workspace. You can also do it with GitHub. (Google doesn’t train on Workspace, Github doesn’t train on business customers, etc)

Pro tip: You could instead spend that money to spin up a forgejo instance for as little as $2 a month https://www.pikapods.com/apps#development (not affiliated, just a happy customer)

Please don't reward these companies with money.

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#70

No we won’t. Details here https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi... For users of Free, Pro and Pro+ Copilot, if you don’t opt out then we will start collecting usage data of Copilot for use in model training. If you are a subscriber for Business or Pro we do not train on usage. The blog post covers more details but we do not train on private repo data at rest, just interaction data with Copilot.…

Right, but it shouldn't be opt-out only to begin with. It's a dishonest pattern that relies on people not noticing. Honest use of data is a "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion" moment for me -- if this is how you're acting when engaging with customers explicitly, I don't trust you to resist the temptation to tap into my data privately. AI companies already have trained their models illegally against the intellectual property of all of humanity with little consent along the way.

Honestly, if you work at GitHub, maybe you should focus on your uptime -- it's awful.

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