It’s not so bad, there’s no double negative and it’s not a confusing “switch” that is always ambiguous as to whether it’s enabled or not.

In contrast when you create a a GCS bucket it uses a checkmark for enabling “public access prevention”. Who designed that modal? It takes me a solid minute to figure out if I’m publishing private data or not.

I went to check on this and I have everything copilot related disabled and in the two bars that measure usage my Copilot Chat usage was somehow in 2%, how is this possible?

Before anyone comes to me to sell me on AI, this is on my personal account, I have and use it in my business account (but it is a completely different user account), I just make it a point to not use it in my personal time so I can keep my skills sharp.

The feature is that your coding style will be in next models!

I guess the "perk" is that maybe their models get retrained on your data making them slightly more useful to you (and everyone else) in the future? idk

Is that not some stock feature-flag verbiage?

It's worded that way to create FOMO in the hopes people keep it enabled.

Dark pattern and dick move.

A few days ago, I unchecked it, only to see it checked again when I reloaded the page.

It could be incompetence but it shouldn't matter. This level of incompetence should be punished equally to malice.

Ugh, can't believe they made this opt-in by default, and didn't even post the direct URLs to disable in their blog post.

To add on to your (already helpful!) instructions:

- Go to https://github.com/settings/copilot/features - Go to the "Privacy" section - Find: "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" - Set to disabled

Yes - not impressed at all that this is opt-in default for business users. We have a policy in place with clients that code we write for them won’t be used in AI training - so expecting us to opt out isn’t an acceptable approach for a business relationship where the expectation is security and privacy.

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488

> Why are you only using data from individuals while excluding businesses and enterprises?

> Our agreements with Business and Enterprise customers prohibit using their Copilot interaction data for model training, and we honor those commitments. Individual users on Free, Pro, and Pro+ plans have control over their data and can opt out at any time.

Just confirming, we do not use Copilot interaction data for model training of Copilot Business or Enterprise customers.

Per their blog post

> Business and Copilot Enterprise users are not affected by this update.

Interestingly, it is disabled by default for me.

What did everyone expect? I can't understand this community's trust of microsoft or startups. It's the typical land grab: start off decent, win people over, build a moat, then start shaking everybody down in the most egregious way possible.

It's just unusual how quickly they're going for the shakedown this time

> Do they have this set on business accounts also by default? If so, this is really shady.

Looks like not, but would it actually have been shadier, or are we just used to individual users being fucked over?

Separate fun fact: Gemini CLI blocks env vars with strings like 'AUTH' in the name. They have two separate configuration options that both let you allow specific env vars. Neither work (bad vibe coding). Tried opening an issue and a PR, and two separate vibe-coding bots picked up my issue and wrote PRs, but nobody has looked at them. Bug's still there, so can't do git code signing via ssh agent socket. Only choice is to do the less-secure, not-signed git commits.

On top of that, Gemini 3 refuses to refactor open source code, even if you fork it, if Gemini thinks your changes would violate the spirit of the intent of the original developers in a safety/security context. Even if you think you're actually making it more secure, but Gemini doesn't, it won't write your code.

Sadly, this issue is systemic: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2847

I swear I just set up enterprise and org level ignore paths.

Ackshually Anthropic is opt-in AND they give you discounts if you enable it

I actually don’t seem to have this option on my GitHub settings page, which leads me to wonder if this only applies to Americans.

> What on earth are they thinking...

@mariorod's public README says one of his focuses is "shaping narratives and changing \"How we Work\"", so there you go.

Made the same choice, my open source projects with users are in maintenance mode or archived. New projects are released via SaaS, compiled artifacts or not at all.

I scratch my open source itch by contributing to existing language and OS projects where incremental change means eventually having to retrain models to get accurate inference :)

Yeah, I'm guessing that probably because in their TOS you grant them some license work-around for running the service, which can mean anything.

I'm in my happy space selfhosting forgejo and having a runner on my own hardware

They didn't even link the setting in their email. They didn't even name it specifically, just vaguely gestured toward it. Dark patterns, but that's Microslop for ya

Quite simply, that's just a matter of the corporate internal policy and its (lack of) enforcement. This problem is just a subset of the wider IP breach with some people happily feeding their work documents into the free tier of ChatGPT.

We do not train on the contents from any paid organization’s repos, regardless of whether a user is working in that repo with a Copilot Free, Pro, or Pro+ subscription. If a user’s GitHub account is a member of or outside collaborator with a paid organization, we exclude their interaction data from model training.

If the code is ever visible to anyone else ever, you have no guarantee. If it’s actually valuable, you have to protect it the same way you’d protect a pile of gold bars.

What does “my code...for my clients” mean (is it yours or theirs)? If it’s theirs let them house it and delegate access to you. If they want to risk it being, ahem...borrowed, that’s their business decision to make.

If it’s yours, you can host it yourself and maintain privacy, but the long tail risk of maintaining it is not as trivial as it seems on the surface. You need to have backups, encrypted, at different locations, geographically distant, so either you need physical security, or you’re using the cloud and need monitoring and alerting, and then need something to monitor the monitor.

It’s like life. Freedom means freedom from tyranny, not freedom from obligation. Choosing a community or living solo in the wilderness both come with different obligations. You can pay taxes (and hope you’re not getting screwed, too much), or you can fight off bears yourself, etc.

They've had ample access to the final output - our code, but they still hope with enough data on HOW we work they can close the agentic gap and finally get those stinky, lazy humans that demand salary out of the loop.

How about "no." You may be okay giving away your individual rights, including to copyright, but I am not.

Hey David - if you want to send me (martinwoodward at github.com) details of your GitHub account I can take a look. At a guess I suspect you are one of the many folks who qualified for GitHub Copilot Pro for free as a maintainer of a popular open source project.

Sounds like you are already opted out because you'd previously opted out of the setting allowing GitHub to collect this data for product improvements. But I can check that.

Note, it's only _usage_ data when using Copilot that is being trained on. Therefore if you are not using Copilot there is no usage data. We do not train on private data at rest in your repos etc.

Most of the new culture and website contents is under full copyright. How much of an obstacle was that to these companies?

That's me. Frankly, looking at just uninstalling VSCode because Copilot straight-up gets in the way of so much, and they stopped even bothering with features that are not related to it (with one exception of native browser in v112, which, admittedly, is great)

If you previously opted out of the setting allowing GitHub to collect data for product improvements, your preference has been retained here. We figured if you didn't want that then you definitely wouldn't want this..

Does it even matter? They trained AI on obviously copyrighted and even pirated content. If this change is legally significant and a legal breach, the existence of all models and all AI businesses also is illegal.

At least one instance where it was enabled in EU countries as well.

That's akin to being grateful for your local shop owner that they allowed you to sweep the floor for other customers.

It’s currently March

Codeberg doesn't support non OSS and I'd rather just have one 'git' thing I have to know for both OSS and private work. So it's not a great option, IMO. Self-hosting also for other reasons.

I'm not sure there are any good GitHub alternatives. I don't trust Gitlab either. Their landing page title currently starts with "Finally, AI". Eek.