Hacker News Reader

I agree. The other cases may be mildly surprising, but ultimately fall firmly into the category of "once public on the internet, always public." Deleting a repo or fork or commit doesn't revoke an access key that was accidentally committed, and an access key being public for even a microsecond should be assumed to have been scraped and usable by a malicious actor.

View on HN

If you have a private repo, you would assume that nothing in that private repo becomes public unless you do something very explicit.

The issue here is that if you have a private repo and a private fork of that repo. If you make the private repo public and keep the fork private, then you are not explicitly told that your fork is actually public, whether you want to or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com