GitHub 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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agustechbro 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Can you prove what you are saying, you have to, if not, you are talking to us like we are idiots.

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anonymousiam 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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...

	▲	taywrobel 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Access meaning read, modify, delete, etc. Pretty standard definition, unless you know of a different meaning of access I’m not privy to. Microsoft can certainly request that we perform actions against repositories, as can governments, customers, random people on the street, etc. Whether action is taken in those cases is a question for lawyers to fight over, but we have the engineering guardrails in place to require it to be an intentional, audited action. I appreciate the spicy question tho, even if misguided!