logoalt Hacker News

martinwoodwardtoday at 12:58 PM10 repliesview on HN

We are not training on the contents of private repos, but we do plan on training on usage data with Copilot unless you opt out before April 24. Details here: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi...

That post has a link to the FAQ which might also be helpful: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488


Replies

coldpietoday at 1:24 PM

> We are not training on the contents of private repos

Supremely ethical of you to ignore the license terms of open source code, but respect the license for proprietary code.

pesustoday at 4:32 PM

Why such strong opposition to getting user consent before doing any of this? Not respecting consent seems to be a very common theme with MS these days, and it really doesn't reflect well on the company or you personally.

ncr100today at 3:01 PM

This too is creepy.

The behavioral impositions by the court in the United States versus Microsoft trial discourage it from Monopoly behavior by opening third-party apis to competitors.

Q: Will Microsoft share its access to users private repos where they have not opted out of this training via its GitHub subsidiary, with third parties (eg OpenAI and Anthropic), in the spirit of its loss to the United States during its trial for Monopoly behavior?

Eg ethically today, Microsoft may be able to be argued to be monopolizing user data for its own AI tooling advantage.

hightrixtoday at 4:27 PM

Opt out is the same as forcing this on people that don’t want it. You know this.

Microslop proving their name time and time again.

microtonaltoday at 6:02 PM

IANAL I wonder how that is legal in the EU, at least for private individuals, since under the GDPR you need consent for collecting such data. (A timed opt-out is not consent.)

ulbutoday at 4:32 PM

why not make it opt-in?

and I wonder if this opt-out applies to data we stored under your umbrella before having opted-out.

jasonjmcgheetoday at 2:22 PM

What am I supposed to opt out of? The only setting in "Privacy" is "Suggestions matching public code" which is blocked and seems wholly unrelated to this.

chapstoday at 3:23 PM

How much has Microsoft paid you to sell your soul?

buildbottoday at 3:35 PM

Yes or No: Hypothetically I put customer data in a private repo, a single file. I use copilot to analyze the file, submitting its contents to that backend. This is the only thing in the repo. Is that data collected and trained on? If the answer is not no, you are lying about what this opt in is.

voganmother42today at 2:16 PM

Opt out is horse shit