Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have files open in VSCode that aren't committed to Git, and that I wouldn't be allowed to commit there even in private repos (customer data covered by GDPR).

In this context I think it's important to note the distinction between "Copilot for Individuals" and "Copilot for Business", because for twice the money you potentially get a lot more privacy:

> What data does Copilot for Individuals collect?

> [...] Depending on your preferred telemetry settings, GitHub Copilot may also collect and retain the following, collectively referred to as “code snippets”: source code that you are editing, related files and other files open in the same IDE or editor, URLs of repositories and files path.

> What data does Copilot for Business collect?

> [...] GitHub Copilot transmits snippets of your code from your IDE to GitHub to provide Suggestions to you. Code snippets data is only transmitted in real-time to return Suggestions, and is discarded once a Suggestion is returned. Copilot for Business does not retain any Code Snippets Data.

https://github.com/features/copilot

This is frightening. I tested copilot when it first came out in beta, while I had client-owned docs, possibly containing API keys, open in the same IDE.

I wonder how long it will be until people's baseline assumption is that their shit is being used in this way... I genuinely don't understand how it isn't already.

My baseline assumption would be that an IDE running on my own box wouldn't be uploading my code somewhere unless it was to my own repositories. Understanding that for Copilot to work, it needs to write prompts to GPT, I'd assume it wasn't uploading anything other than the tab it was working in. Not just, like, scanning my whole drive and uploading everything. That's insane.

Maybe I rely too much on the community to red flag these things. I don't install questionable extensions. I wouldn't have tested copilot at all if it hadn't received such enthusiastic support (here, among other places). The fact that it isn't sandboxed to the document you're working on should make it an absolute malware pariah, and this is the first I'm hearing of it.

unless that's directly in the contract, I'd not trust Microsoft to discard anything that might be of value in a training dataset at some point in the future

say, if training is determined to be fair use

At the very least, it has its own privacy policy.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/gith...

I’m now curious if the CoPilot feedback loop is going to end up with someone getting a suggestion for an existing API key.

I would hope they’re training it to recognize and not suggest API keys. I would emphasize that as an explicitly important part of its initial definition-of-self/prompt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com