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

SunshineTheCat

RIP all the people who have been paying Github for years and never happen to see the notice.

i7l

Thanks for flagging this!

livinglist

Thanks for posting this, I was never made aware of this by GitHub..

kristianp

What's a good alternative for free private repos?

jokoon

weren't they already using repos for training?

lanxevo3

To be precise: the opt-out is for GitHub Copilot training specifically, which has always required opt-in for public repos under their policy. The change Apr 24 is about private repos being included by default unless you opt out. If you're using Copilot in your private repos, definitely opt out unless you're comfortable with that. The setting is at github.com/settings/copilot — takes 30 seconds.

starkeeper

So now CoPilot will be EVEN better at writing viruses, worms and malware!

sethops1

When Louis Rossmann started describing tech leadership as having a "rapist mentality" I brushed him off as being sensationalist. But actions like this make me think more and more he's right. The product managers pushing for changes like this are despicable scum.

kepano

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

maxloh

Context: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488 TLDR: As long as you aren't using Copilot, your code should be safe (according to GitHub). What data are you collecting? When an individual user has this setting enabled, the interaction data we may collect includes: - Outputs accepted or modified by the user - Inputs sent to GitHub Copilot, including code snippets shown to the model - Code context surrounding the user’s cursor position - Comment and documentation that the user wrote - File names, repository structure, and navigation patterns - Interactions with Copilot features including Chat and inline suggestions

mondainx

Get ready for some dope code... ;)

yonatan8070

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)

bonestamp2

Thanks for the heads up, I assumed they had already done this with my data.

hedayet

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

landl0rd

This headline is false; it will not go take your private repos and dump them into a training dataset. Rather, GitHub will train on your copilot interactions with your private repos. If you do not use copilot, this makes no difference to you, though you should probably still turn it off.

Sohcahtoa82

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 of bad data to poison an LLM's training.

shell0x

Shouldn’t this be “Tell HN”?

jollyllama

It's not clear to me what happens to personal repos if you're getting Copilot for work, or where to disable it there.

13415

It is the feature "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" that needs to be disabled. Right? Or am I missing some trick / dark GUI pattern? Just want to make sure.

martinwoodward

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. If you don’t use Copilot this will not affect you. However you can still opt out now if you wish and that preference will be retained if you decide to start using Copilot in the future. Hope that helps.