alt Hacker NewsGitHub Copilot engineer here working on identity, safety, and privacy - no, even Microsoft doesn’t have access to all GitHub repos.
As years have passed since the acquisition “company” delineations have blurred a bit, but Microsoft employees still need to go through a separate onboarding process to access any GitHub company resources (internal repositories, telemetry, documentation, etc.), and then we have an additional layer of entitlements to gate and audit access to any sensitive data, including user data.
Very few employees within GitHub proper even have access to view private repositories, and in the rare cases where that’s done for legal or safety reasons the repository owner is notified.
There are currently no OpenAI employees with access to GitHub systems, so there’s about 4 layers of protection in place to prevent private repositories access. We do genuinely take user data protection and privacy seriously.
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How do you define "access" here? Microsoft has demonstrated that it can delete any GitHub repo at will. Maybe there's some shell entity between corporate "Microsoft" and "GitHub" that's doing the dirty deeds without attribution...
Can you prove what you are saying, you have to, if not, you are talking to us like we are idiots.
This is a nice answer to the question "how is GitHub preventing rogue employees at Microsoft from stealing my private repositories?". Like, it's good to know I'm covered if Microsoft accidentally hires a North Korean spy or something.
But if Microsoft really was selling private repo content to OpenAI, it probably wouldn't go through those access controls. It'd be an executive-level decision with enough force to plow through all the red tape, and it'd be implemented as a data pipeline or similar automated process that wouldn't trigger the same kind of notification as, like, a Trust and Safety employee taking manual action.
Probably the better evidence here is in GitHub's ToS where they say in pretty strong/binding terms that they aren't doing this: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... . If they are secretly selling your data to OpenAI they haven't left themselves a ton of wiggle room if people ever found out.
(Probably the biggest loophole they could use is to send private repo content to an OpenAI service for scanning/safety purposes. The ToS allows this and they're almost certainly doing it with other services like PhotoDNA. Then OpenAI can just violate whatever agreement they have not to store the data sent to that service.)