To Github's credit, they have been showing a banner consistently. To my discredit - I never bothered to read that banner until I saw this HN headline
I've never seen the banner. Where does this show up?
Probably have to have adblockers turned off.
If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
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Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
#112I'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)
At the risk of stating the obvious, I don't think it makes sense to reward them with money for trying to pull a bait-and-switch on this.
Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
> Google doesn’t train on Workspace, Github doesn’t train on business customers, etc ...yet
Or, they don't train on it, but who's to say they're not harvesting analytics which may or may or not code samples, prompt data, etc. Which are then laundered through some sort of anonymization pipeline, to the point where they can argue that it no longer qualifies as your data, and can be freely trained upon.
Conspiratorial thinking? Sure. But if you've been around for a couple decades and seen the games these people play (and you aren't a complete sucker), then you'll at least be aware that there's at least slight possibility that these companies can get things from their customers that they (the customers) did not knowingly agree to.
Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
#114To Github's credit, they have been showing a banner consistently. To my discredit - I never bothered to read that banner until I saw this HN headline
How does that help if you don't go to the github site but just use git from the command line?
Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
#115No 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.…
“Opt-out” is an egregiously toxic and unethical approach to consent and should be illegal everywhere that it isn’t already.
I didn’t think Github had much of a brand left to damage, but here we are.
Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
#116Thanks for flagging this!
Note that “flagging” has a specific meaning on HN.
Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
#117I started self hosting my own git on a digital ocean droplet with Gitea (1). It’s been unbelievably fantastic and trivially easy to manage experience and I can make them public and invite contrib ans do integrations … I see zero downsides
I see no reason to ever go back to holding my code elsewhere.
Don’t forget git is fairly new
When I first started doing production code it was pre-github so we used some other kind of repo management system
This is a perfect example of where the they’re starting to cannibalize their base and now we have the ability to get away from them entirely.
Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
#118No 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.…
This is a distinction without a difference, according to the text of that enable/disable dialog,
> Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training: Allow GitHub to collect and use my Inputs, Outputs, and associated context to train and improve AI models. Read more in the Privacy Statement.
“Associated Context” is the repo. If I use copilot, I’m giving it access to my repo.
I don’t know in all the ways copilot can be triggered, and I’m not certain that I could stop it from being triggered, given Microsoft’s past behaviors in slapping Copilot on everything that exists.
Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
#119Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
#120They just lost my repos. I can not believe they snuck this in. My level of anger right now is far higher that I ever wanted to feel. I went to API access for anthropic, paying more in the process, to avoid them training on my code. And GH just -adds- this, without telling me? Without a prompt. They are dead to me.
make sure you opt-out anyway before deleting your account. they'll probably train on some archived version if it sees your profile didn't opt-out at some point.
honest question: is there any realistic mechanism that will make them accountable if let's say they just train on 100% of repos without regards to opt-ins? I operate under the premise these tech companies can do whatever they want and there's very little oversight.