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If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
This is where you can opt out. It's absurd that they are automatically opting users into this.
https://github.com/settings/copilot/features
- totierne2 7mo agoThere is always other peoples ftp servers as Linus used to say.
- Uhhrrr 7mo agoPut an ORM in your private repo which randomly 1% of the time calls DROP TABLE.
- SunshineTheCat 7mo agoRIP all the people who have been paying Github for years and never happen to see the notice.
- tedivm 7mo agoI think opt out is stupid, but the notice is on every page of github using their banner display right now. They've also blasted out emails.
- flykespice 7mo agoAt least they are being very upfront with it (I guess?), most companies just slickly add the clause on their routinely TOS update.
- SirensOfTitan 7mo agoIf they were being honest they would ask explicitly for permission instead of advertising opt-out. Now you might ask: who will explicitly give Microsoft permission to train on their private works? No one will -- and that's the point: this is a form of theft.
- malfist 7mo agoAnd how many people who use git on github go to the website? I only do when my token has expired and I need to grab a new one to push again. Which is every 90 days. Github.com is mostly invisible infrastructure to me.
- _bypa 7mo agoThanks for flagging this!
- mondainx 7mo agoGet ready for some dope code... ;)
- livinglist 7mo agoThanks for posting this, I was never made aware of this by GitHub..
- lkbm 7mo agoIf you use Github, you should have an email from ~2 days ago with the subject "Important Update to GitHub Copilot Interaction Data Usage Policy". Easy to skip over assuming it's just one of a million private policy update emails. If you don't use Github Copilot, this shouldn't effect you, and may be why you got no email. The current headline is fairly misleading--it's about Copilot usage, not private repos per se.
- livinglist 7mo agoI see, thanks for clarification!
- kristianp 7mo agoWhat's a good alternative for free private repos?
- Supermancho 7mo agoGitlab? Microsoft services are tech debt. I moved the moment they were acquired and never regretted it.
- nottorp 7mo agoI opened gitlab.com and it starts with "Finally, AI for the entire software lifecycle." Not very trust inspiring, that. Can I even have git hosting without anything else being crammed down my throat, or it's just like Microsoft?
- throwaway613746 7mo agoA cheap mini-pc in your closet.
- eblume 7mo agoI've recently started hosting my own forgejo instance. It works so well! Free tailscale for connectivity. I expose mine over fly.io proxy, also free, but not to be done without caution.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo agoI would've recommended codeberg but codeberg isn't the finest to be recommended for free private repos. I definitely feel like more can be done within this space and that there is space for more competitors (even forgejo instances for that matter)
- mrweasel 7mo agoIt's a fair question, but if you need private repos, I think you need to start considering a paid option, or self-host. If it's really important to you that the repo is private, I'd self-host.
- conductr 7mo ago
- jokoon 7mo agoweren't they already using repos for training?
- darthwalsh 7mo agoNot private repos. Now, anything that gets referenced in a copilot chat is fair game
- lanxevo3 7mo ago[flagged]
- martinwoodward 7mo agoIt wasn’t previously opt-in. Previously we didn’t do any training on usage. However as other products have come into the market they do train on usage. We’ve been training on our internal usage for just over a year and have seen some major improvements. For details see of the types of improvements we’ve seen from training on our internal usage check out this article: https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/copilot-new-embedding-model-vs-code/ https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/copilot-new-e...
- homebrewer 7mo agoYou can always ask your parent company to train on their usage. I hear they have incredibly massive codebases: Windows, Office, MSSQL, which stay out of training data for some reason. I thought neural nets never repeat the training data verbatim, and copyright does not pass through them, so what's the problem?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- NewsaHackO 7mo agoHow do you know that isn't already the case?
- IcyWindows 7mo agoWho said they don't?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- mentalgear 7mo agoThis seems reasonable, maybe too much so. > If they want to incentivise people to contribute their sources and copilot sessions, they could easily make it opt-in on a per-repository basis and provide some incentive, like an increased token quota.
- starkeeper 7mo agoSo now CoPilot will be EVEN better at writing viruses, worms and malware!
- sethops1 7mo agoWhen 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.
- doubled112 7mo agoEven the way modern software phrases questions is rapey. Imagine a man asking a woman “want to have sex? Or maybe later?” out of the blue, then asking her again every 3 days until she says “yes”
- chuckadams 7mo agoSomething like "tea and consent": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ Yeah, it ain't sex, but it does still come down to basic respect.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ChadNauseam 7mo agoThe situation you describe has dynamics that don't apply when your windows laptop is trying to get you to install an update. A woman can't have 100% confidence that saying no won't trigger a man into rage, so just the question being asked at all is already a bit unpleasant. WinRAR trying to get me to buy a license is not as offensive because I know it won't beat me up for saying no.
- doubled112 7mo agoOf course. Claiming this is a 1:1 would be wrong. However, do you think people accept Microsoft backup because they want a backup? Or do you think they click yes because it makes the popup go away for good? Wearing me down until I say yes isn’t the same as just yes. It’s the same dark pattern for the 10-11 upgrade. My father in law managed to upgrade by accident because it kept popping up. He didn’t really make an informed choice for himself. One day he just couldn’t figure out why everything was different.
- kepano 7mo agoI'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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37124188
- cj 7mo agoEdit: 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)
- throwuxiytayq 7mo agoIt's not a pro tip if it only fucks you over slightly later. How's the weather in Stockholm?
- thot_experiment 7mo agoProbably don't reward extortion with money.
- kelnos 7mo agoYou don't have to use their free service if you don't like its terms. "Extortion" is a bit of an exaggeration here. Yes, I know, it's dicey when people get used to a nice, friendly platform, and the platform gains lots of users, and then at some point (or several points), the terms start getting worse, and people feel misled and betrayed. I get that. But this is a corporation. Hell, this is Microsoft. It's hilarious how many people think they've actually changed since their antitrust judgment in the 90s. I guess a lot of folks here are too young to remember it, even. Companies exist to make money. If they are giving you something for free, they are either a) getting something else out of it already, or b) giving it to you for free now and looking for ways to get their own value out of it later. I don't mean that in some sort of cynical, "fuck the world" sense; that's just reality, and that's fine, for the most part. If you don't like this, don't use free services provided by corporations. Host your own. Yes, I know it can cost money. Yes, I know it's more work. But that's life. TANSTAAFL. I've had a VPS running for a couple decades on a small provider. These days it costs me a little under $200/year. Much cheaper options exist. I run a web server, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a slew of other things on it. It requires very little maintenance because I just run Debian stable on it, keep up with security updates, but otherwise leave it alone. It backs up the important stuff to S3 using duplicity, but -- knock on wood -- I've never had a catastrophic failure that required a restore in the ~20 years its been running.
- maxloh 7mo agoContext: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488 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
- yonatan8070 7mo agoHow 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)
- hedayet 7mo agoUnder privacy. > Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training
- yonatan8070 7mo agoStrange, looks like I don't have that option at all https://postimg.cc/LJD5w1rv https://postimg.cc/LJD5w1rv
- sdoering 7mo agoI don't see this. Might be a regional/geofenced thing with the EU, not sure. Or because I have a corporate Copilot license through my day job org.
- peacebeard 7mo agoI don't see it there, but I do see it in screenshots online. Maybe it was removed or moved.
- lkbm 7mo agoStill at https://github.com/settings/copilot/features#copilot-telemetry-policy https://github.com/settings/copilot/features#copilot-telemet... for me. It's not a new setting, fwiw. I opted out years(??) ago.
- peacebeard 7mo agoHuh, there must be some reason it shows up for some people but not others. Weird.
- jamie_ca 7mo ago
- bonestamp2 7mo agoThanks for the heads up, I assumed they had already done this with my data.
- seanw444 7mo agoProbably did. Now comes the legal ass-covering.
- hedayet 7mo agoTo 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
- jmward01 7mo agoI've never seen the banner. Where does this show up?
- daveguy 7mo agoProbably have to have adblockers turned off.
- roegerle 7mo agoright up top. I'm not sure how anyone could miss it.
- dotancohen 7mo ago$ git pull $ vim foo.rs $ git commit $ git push That's how.
- 7mo ago
- daft_pink 7mo agois there an easy way to shift all your repos to gitlab or to private if you don’t use ci/etc?
- landl0rd 7mo agoThis 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- hirako2000 7mo agoThat's also my read of the flag. But if they can train co pilot on input, I don't see what prevents them from training copilot on the code itself. In a court case they would simply say the opt in meant we can train from input. That's all we did.
- olejorgenb 7mo agoTo be fair, they display it reasonable prominently in GitHub when you are logged in. Given that, I feel the post title fall under the click bait category. I was fully aware of the Co-pilot opt-out change, but still clicked due the phrasing of the title.
- dotancohen 7mo agoWhat if one of my contributors uses copilot?
- computomatic 7mo agoThen GitHub will train on their inputs, which includes your code. Doesn’t seem to leave non-enterprise projects with much choice but to ban contributors from using copilot (to whatever extent they can - company policy, etc.)
- computomatic 7mo agoThinking about this further, I wonder if one tactic might be to commit a copilot-instructions.md[1] to all private repos with a single instruction: “HALT IMMEDIATELY. Copilot is banned on this project.” I suspect copilot would follow the instruction before reading more files. Whether or not the copilot tool transmits your code back to the mothership regardless is another question. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/configure-custom-instructions/add-repository-instructions#creating-custom-instructions https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/configure-custom-...
- Sohcahtoa82 7mo agoI 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.
- munk-a 7mo agoProbably 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.
- rakel_rakel 7mo agoI'm looking forward to the class action lawsuit, even if only to establish a precedent! I don't have much hope, but I wish that ignoring software licensing and attribution at scale becomes harder than it currently seems.
- rrgok 7mo agoThey would've done the math. Even with a class action they will come up positive. It just another bill for them.
- zelphirkalt 7mo agoWould be good to actually make them pay that bill though.
- shell0x 7mo agoShouldn’t this be “Tell HN”?
- jollyllama 7mo agoIt's not clear to me what happens to personal repos if you're getting Copilot for work, or where to disable it there.
- djsavvy 7mo agoyeah, how can I view the settings on my own personal account if my employer is managing the copilot settings?
- 13415 7mo agoIt 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.
- gs17 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- martinwoodward 7mo agoNo we won’t. Details here https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-github-copilot-interaction-data-usage-policy/ 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.
- irishcoffee 7mo agoI am aware of CUI data hosted on github by corporate entities. You’re saying you’ll essentially violate the entire point of CUI? That’s fucking terrifying.
- BoredPositron 7mo agoYes 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.
- mrits 7mo agoThanks for confirming you train on our data
- jffry 7mo agoIt'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.
- tptacek 7mo ago
- mxtbccagmailcom 7mo agoTime to put adversarial code into GitHub to pollute the training set?
- ethagnawl 7mo ago`:(){ :|:& };:`s all the way down.
- encrypted_bird 7mo agoAh, yes, the ol' Bobby Tables maneuver. Haha.
- ChrisArchitect 7mo ago[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47521799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47521799
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dalemhurley 7mo agoAt least they are giving you the option to opt out, many other providers just trained on the source code.
- uberman 7mo agoIf even one person in a repo does not disable this will copilot have full access to the repo? How can I determine if other members of my team have turned this off or not?
- hirako2000 7mo agoThe same way you can't determine whether a team member pulling the repo dumped the code into a prompt. It's convenient for MS to make this opt in by default for sure.
- elAhmo 7mo agoIt’s not convenient, it is a deliberate decision.
- harikb 7mo agoThe UI options are also shady af. The setting reads Enabled - "You will have access to this feature" as help text. Disabled - "You will not have access to this feature". WTF does that mean?
- gs17 7mo agoI saw that too, it feels like it's worded to make it sound like it's mandatory for Copilot. Based on their blog post the "feature" is them training on your data.
- mxtbccagmailcom 7mo agoTime to place some adversarial code into GitHub to pollute training set?
- jambutters 7mo agoWhere does it say it will train on private? This seems like a security nightmare if it trains on hardcoded keys
- chistev 7mo agoHaving hardcoded keys is a security nightmare regardless.
- parsimo2010 7mo agoJokes 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.
- aduwah 7mo agoI will join the club. +1 for ruining M$ AI with my garbage code
- forinti 7mo agoPoisoning LLMs is an interesting path of resistance.
- roegerle 7mo agoWell known running code has more weight than unknown code that may not run. I think it’s pointless.
- tempaccount420 7mo agoUnless the repository uses GitHub's CI. Then it's extremely useful, could be used as RL environment.
- rrgok 7mo agoI'm gonna put a license fee on all my repos. 10% of revenue if my private repos have been used for AI training. 5% on all my other repos.
- contingencies 7mo agoThank you.
- shevy-java 7mo agoMicroslop tries to make money off of our data on github. Not a big surprise though.
- jmward01 7mo agoThey 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.
- ares623 7mo agomake 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.
- gverrilla 7mo agohonest 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.
- ares623 7mo agoNo, there isn't. You're relying on PMs or engineers who still care will see it happening and call it out. Other than that, it can become evidence in some future lawsuit. But the damage to you would've already been don.
- api 7mo agoNot your storage, not your data (unless it's encrypted with keys you control).
- munk-a 7mo agoThe only setting I'm seeing is on a per-user basis. Does anyone know how to blanket disable training on an organizational basis? Is there any information about how much information from an organization managed repo may be trained on if an individual user has this flag enabled? Will one leaky account cause all of our source code to be considered fair game?
- moralestapia 7mo agoIs this the case even if you're a paid customer? If so, this might be illegal.
- tartoran 7mo agoIf you opt out Github will probably still train on your private repo. Just migrate.
- jpcrs 7mo agoGood luck to them, my private repos are probably some of the worst code humanity has produced.
- endofreach 7mo agoHow did people forget that github was purchased by that one company?
- torben-friis 7mo agoHow's the codeberg experience nowadays? I think it's finally time to switch for me.
- bsza 7mo agoI've been encrypting my private git repos for a while because I had suspected they were going to do something like this. https://github.com/flolu/git-gcrypt https://github.com/flolu/git-gcrypt It's very easy to set up and integrates nicely into git. Obviously only works if you don't need Actions or anything that requires Github to know what's in your repo (duh).
- AndrewKemendo 7mo agoI 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. (1) https://about.gitea.com/ https://about.gitea.com/
- hachimanbest 7mo ago[dead]
- hachimanbest 7mo ago[dead]
- prmoustache 7mo agoWhile I understand the network effect of github for public project, I don't really understand why one would want to use it for private repos. There are tons of git providers including free ones that include full gitlab/gitea/forgejo to get similar features to github and there is nothing more easy to self host or host on a vps with near zero maintenance.
- w10-1 7mo agoSorry, which ones support 2-GB private repositories and are supported by package managers?
- artyom 7mo agoThe same reason b/c FreeBSD is great, but eventually it's transitioned to Linux at scale: commodity personnel. You wouldn't believe the amount of people that would list Github, but not git, as a skill.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- woodylondon 7mo agojokes on them - all the code in all my repos are written by AI :)
- yakbarber 7mo agotrain on my private code? jokes on them
- maltyxxx 7mo ago[flagged]
- aplomb1026 7mo ago[dead]
- mrled 7mo agoI'm curious about specific consequences of this. I tend to think the importance of code secrecy has always been exaggerated (there are specific exceptions like hedge fund strategies and malware), even more so now in this post-Claude world. Does anyone have specific things they're trying to avoid by opting out of this?
- jawilson2 7mo agoAlgorithms and models for a proprietary trading system? My personal notes? The latex text of my phd thesis? I will go screaming and kicking and fighting into this dystopian nightmare post-privacy shithole world that so many people seem fine with. If I have to move off of every service or technology to maintain some semblance of privacy so be it.
- mrled 7mo agoWell, mostly I was thinking about code, and aside from the specific exceptions of trading algorithms (which I was trying to get at when I said hedge fund strategies), and now PhD theses (good point, at least if you're talking pre-publication), I'm still having trouble understanding the threat model even if AI did train on most proprietary, private business code. Can AI training on a CRUD app's code damage a business? And I have the same question about private notes, or even a diary. Can an AI training on a bunch of personal stuff damage the person that wrote it? Do you really keep trading algorithms on github?
- zelphirkalt 7mo agoWell, depends on what you have in those private notes and how others will query the LLMs trained on that private data. Maybe you write things in private notes that are a reason for private notes to remain private.
- sedatk 7mo agoI have an individual GitHub Copilot Pro subscription and also am a member of an Enterprise account that has one of its GitHub Copilot Business seats assigned to me. The opt-out setting doesn't appear on my individual profile anymore. However, I want to be able to use individual GitHub Copilot subscription for my individual work, and it seems like I can't do it anymore as Enterprise has taken over all my preferences. What a mess.
- _pdp_ 7mo agoRather than defending this absurd decision, GitHub could instantly win back trust by admitting they f*** up and reversing it entirely. If they want to incentivise people to contribute their sources and copilot sessions, they could easily make it opt-in on a per-repository basis and provide some incentive, like an increased token quota. This is not hard.
- NegativeK 7mo agoAI is maximizing the move fast and break things approach, including not asking for permission from its userbase. It's consistent with believing that AI is the future -- if a company doesn't perform really well, it loses that race. And if the userbase they piss off is also the userbase that's skeptical about AI, then they're not pissing off anyone that's relevant to the company winning. Downside: Pissing off users is gross.
- danaris 7mo agoThe problem is, GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is desperately trying to shove AI into everything in hopes that it will save them.
- bdangubic 7mo agoThat training will be like “OMG this is horrible… WAIT I wrote this shit”
- salawat 7mo agoGod, there's always that moment when you see the most shit code on earth, just as you're typing "git blame" and you just start chanting "please don't be me".
- jacamera 7mo agoLots of hair splitting in the comments. The service is so unreliable at this point that I don’t trust them to not train on private repos even accidentally. You’re one vibe-coded PR away from having all your data scooped up regardless of any policy or intention.
- bolangi 7mo agoHah, github can have my crap code. Anyone trained on it will be in for a world of hurt :-)
- Esophagus4 7mo agoCan’t wait for copilot to start saying stuff like // todo… remove this before it goes to prod lol
- hilti 7mo agoOh - they didn't train silently already?! ;-) Going to move my repositories then next week.
- frizlab 7mo agoIs there a way to disable training on repositories that are in organizations?
- sholladay 7mo ago[dead]
- w10-1 7mo agohttps://github.com/settings/copilot/features https://github.com/settings/copilot/features The feature to opt out is at the bottom under privacy: "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" TIL: you cannot opt out of a copilot-pro subscription. How is it a subscription if I can't cancel? (Honestly, who has time to evade all these traps? Or to migrate 150+ repo's on 6+ machines...)
- tantalor 7mo ago"Don't touch my garbage!"
- JonChesterfield 7mo agoDon't give your code to Microsoft if you don't want them to have your code. This setting will make no difference to whether your code is fed into their training set. "Oops we accidentally ignored the private flag years ago and didn't realise, we are very sorry, we were trying to not do that".
- GMoromisato 7mo agoI'm sure this is just me, but I don't mind if AI trains on my public or private repos. I suspect my imagination is just not good enough to come up with downsides. So far it's been a benefit because coding agents seems to understand my code and can follow my style. I don't store client data (much less credentials) in my repos (public or private) so I'm not worried about data leaks. And I don't expect any of my clients to decide to replace me and vibe code their way to a solution. I do worry (slightly) about large company competitors using AI to lower their prices and compete with me, but that's going to happen regardless of whether anyone trains on my code. And my own increases in efficiency due to AI have made up for that.
- wilsonjholmes 7mo agoAt least they are finally being honest about the direction of the business. I have thought for a long while that they were already doing this and just not telling anyone...
- hexage1814 7mo agoIf you opt out... they will also train on your private repos.
- pokot0 7mo agowhile I agree, I understood this is only when you use copilot? if not, their communication is very misleading
- uwagar 7mo agowhy all u programmers cant make ur own website and host ur own git servers?
- nitrogen99 7mo agoSo? It’s not like some human is spying on your private emails or chats. This is just code. Relax.
- jongjong 7mo agoWow. This is theft. Should be illegal! It's like if I own a vault storage business and I am keeping other people's gold in my vaults and then I just take all the gold for myself and claim that the customers should have opted out of me stealing their gold but they missed the deadline...
- zelphirkalt 7mo agoThis hints at something, that in my opinion isn't not discussed enough: Say some personal data leaked into training data, where can I request surgical deletion of that data from the LLM? Not only license washing is done using LLM, but also PII washing and consent ignoring is done using LLMs. How will a service provider make sure to not ever have personal data in the training data set and fix earlier mistakes pertaining to personal data? Are they not obliged to have a way of deleting one's personal data? GDPR or something?
- VladVladikoff 7mo agoThe most shocking part of this news to me is that they aren’t doing this already.
- shamelessdev 7mo agoThis is the exact reason I vibe coded “artifact”. Not for commercial success, just wanted a git and github like experience for my new game project. Then I started getting into features specific to game dev like moving away from LFS and properly diffing binaries. paganartifact.com/benny/artifact Mirror: GitHub bennyschmidt/artifact
- leej111 7mo agoBased
- maplethorpe 7mo agoWhat's the best way to poison my repos to sabotage LLM training? Asking for a friend.
- NegativeK 7mo agoBy migrating to another code forge and paying them so they're sustainable. Which doesn't answer your question at all, but it is the metric they'll pay attention to. And it is the the thing that actually addresses the underlying problem.
- gafferongames 7mo agoIf you guys didn't already realize that Microsoft was a garbage company in the 90s I really don't know what to say...
- piekvorst 7mo agoPersonally, I don’t mind. Train however you want.
- seankwon816 7mo ago[dead]
- Esophagus4 7mo agoThere’s a lot of furor in this thread, but people felt the same way when Google Street View came out. Eventually they worked through most of the thorny bits and people use Street View now. I suspect MSFT is in a similar spot. If they don’t train on more data, they’ll be left behind by Anthropic/OAI. If they do, they’ll annoy a few diehards for a while, they’ll work through the kinks, then everyone will get used to it.
- computomatic 7mo agoThat comparison doesn’t hold at all. This would be equivalent to Google publishing photos of inside your home. Or, perhaps more directly, training their image-gen models on your private Google Photos.
- Esophagus4 7mo agoConceptually I think it’s a fine comparison. They’re training (with an opt out) on stuff people feel is an invasion of their privacy to make their service better.
- danaris 7mo ago> (with an opt out) And this is the problem: any time you're adding a new "feature" that invades users' privacy, it needs to be opt-in.
- Esophagus4 7mo ago> it needs to be opt-in. And again: Google did this and everyone eventually got over it. Cars do this with telematics data and everyone is over that too.
- danaris 7mo agoThat doesn't change the ethics of it. The only reason that worked is because Google is an unstoppable monopoly juggernaut whose name is literally synonymous with searching the web.
- ljm 7mo agoNever have I seen a company try so damn hard to make something a thing than Microsoft and Copilot. And it is absolute dogshit. And offensive to actual copilots.
- holoduke 7mo agoFor 5 bucks you can host your own gitea with most GitHub functionally. I moved my 500 repos to it. Actions are working perfectly fine. I make daily snapshots on hetzner. Trust them for that backup part.
- Ancalagon 7mo agoThis is the worst year of enshittification I can recall. Literally everything is going to shit.
- victorbjorklund 7mo agoThanks for the heads up.
- roegerle 7mo agoDo people not browse GitHub? All I’m reading is “I’m never at the web ui”. I love falling into a rabbit hole looking at people’s projects
- rcdwealth 7mo ago[dead]
- classified 7mo agoThey steal your code to train their AI, and then they sell it back to you. Why didn't I think of that, I could be rich by now.
- snowballons 7mo agoAny recommendations for light use GitHub users. ??
- shifto 7mo agoIn my case, co-pilot will be training on co-pilot code. I'm probably not alone so I don't think they're getting what they hope they're getting.
- aimemobe 7mo ago[flagged]
- aimemobe 7mo ago[flagged]