Can anyone at GitHub get a copy of my private repo(s) because I'm out if they can.
"Move fast and take a copy of the referrers table."
Legit question, in case someone thinks I'm trolling or whatever.
By security, though, I wouldn't expect the guarantees of financial data or whatever, but internal audit and access controls, i.e. not the scenario of "any engineer at Github" that the GP has inferred. IIRC, for example, at Google only specific engineers, such as SREs, are given uber-access to user data as part of their duties: https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-spying-fir...
a) potentially threaten GitHub's business (blackmail, disgruntled employee, internal threat, security services, concerned comments like this etc.)
b) real companies store their source code on GitHub; their source code is, at least, 50% of their business.
c) GitHub isn't really a startup anymore, they have hundreds of employees, you can't let that many people have unfettered access to data. Someone could loose a laptop...
d) As mentioned, Yahoo! was very careful with customer data
e) It's called a Private Repo
I'm making a big set of assumptions, you are right. I'll move my GitHub to my own server now... installing GitLab which I absolutely hate but it's better than trusting an unknown set of engineers.
I've just realised probably any Digital Ocean engineer can get root on my box if they want to right :-(
Your overall point is valid, but employee losing a laptop is a much narrower problem to solve for: set JAMF policies that enforce full-disk encryption and reasonably strong passwords, write off any machines that are lost/stolen. Figuring out employee trust models is a much broader/harder problem.
> I've just realised probably any Digital Ocean engineer can get root on my box if they want to right :-(
I would assume yes.
The system administrators of anything multi-tenant can access your data. The problem is they probably don't care. It's up to you where to draw that line, though.
"Administering a mail host is sort of like being a nurse; there's a brief period at the start when the thought of seeing people's privates might be vaguely titillating in a theoretical sense, but that sort of thing doesn't last long when it's up against the daily reality of mess. Now that I think about it, administering a mail host is exactly like being a nurse, only people die slightly less often."
I can't speak for any other Git hosting service, of course, but if you have a private repository in Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services then:
- all engineers are given a background check before being hired - very few engineers have access to production servers or databases, only those who have an operational neccesity - engineers that do have production access are given a still stricter background check
Certainly we don't have private repository just lying around, and yes we do treat them like they're your financial data.
Microsoft hosts all of its source code in VSTS, including Windows. This is data that we absolutely want to protect. Our customers' data is no different.