Project

General

Profile

Is GitHub considered privacy-friendly?

anarcobuda - over 4 years ago -

It's another company with an overwhelmingly long Privacy Policy.
I'm reading it little by little, and I've noticed a few uses of common jargon used by privacy-endangering companies.
For instance:

Github

"We use User Personal Information and other data to make recommendations for you (...)"

Facebook

"We use the information we have to deliver our Products, including to personalize features and content (...) and make suggestions for you"

It isn't necessarily a red-flag since between language, meaning and intention there's always indecipherable possibilities, and also I have yet to read their policy as a whole.
So has anyone ever heard of anything about GitHub on this matter?


Replies (3)

RE: Is GitHub considered privacy-friendly? - freemor - over 4 years ago -

I think most free software people consider GitHub problematic for many reasons

SaaS - Free software people generally consider this a trap and re-brand it as SaSS (Service as a Software Substitute)
Basically just another way to lose control of your computing.

Centralization - Git is very confortable being a very distributed system. Which if used that way would spread copies of a project over many costs and computers making it mor robust
GitHub does everything it can to discourage this aand force you to use git hub. Also in the category is the single point of failure issue. If github went bye-bye
many software projects would be completely defunct.

Autonomy - You do not have control of your code if the place you are hosting it can decide at the drop of a hat that your stuff is not worthy and vanish it. This has happened.

So I think with GitHub privacy is only one of many concerns. For all these reasons I refuse to ever have a github account. I would not be surprised if many here feel the same.

RE: Is GitHub considered privacy-friendly? - anarcobuda - over 4 years ago -

And their privacy policy language doesn't get better. So unfortunate, because it's a project with a lot of potential.
Do you know any libre alternative to it right now?

RE: Is GitHub considered privacy-friendly? - bill-auger - over 4 years ago -

there are several libre alternatives such as pagure, gitlab, and
gitea - if you want to use a freebie public service, i would
recommend pagure or notabug

https://pagure.io/
https://notabug.org

savannah is another fine option; though it does not have all
of the webby bells-and-whistles that you may be expecting

the key concern though, is that none of them qualify as libre
unless you self-host - anytime that you rely on someone
elses computer, to do something that you could do yourself, you
necessarily forfeit software freedom

all of the issues raised in this thread are the essential
motivation for forge-fed - co-incidentally (or maybe not) the
lead dev of forge-fed also is one who refuses to use github for
any purpose; but FWIW thats not a an objection to github in
particular, and neither are most of the issue raised in this
thread - sourceforge, bitbucket, gitlab, and others share the
same "walled-garden" problem because they are running on
someone elses computers and they do not inter-operate

there is a good introduction to forge-fed here -->
https://notabug.org/peers/forgefed/src/master/doc

    (1-3/3)