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Comment by landl0rd | Hacker News Reader

This 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.

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What if one of my contributors uses copilot?

Then 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.)

Thinking 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-...

That'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.

To 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.

I think this kind of nuance is useless or even harmful. That might be how it is now but they'll change it when you're not looking.

You see coders have this reasoning flaw where they go "Oh I've understood the system, now I can work out all the ramifications of my actions", and then they get tricked at every step of the life.

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