How exactly is GitHub supposed to work if their computers are not allowed to look at your code? Git doesn't work by magic.
Receiving files, copying them within a file system, and transmitting the contents? Clearly not looking.
Computing a hash for each file? Doesn’t seem like looking either.
Parsing the contents, or tokenizing them for a ML model? That’s looking IMO.
I think the defining factor is the size and nature of the derived state update on the server. Copying and transmitting retains only metadata about the file. Computing a hash produces only a handful of bytes of state about the file, and there’s nothing that can be inferred about the file’s contents from the hash. But if you start storing something like word frequencies, that’s not neutral anymore, it’s a “look” into the contents.
The state update based on the file contents happens in my brain, and that’s the “look” action.
When Gmail was introduced two decades ago, there was some short-lived furore about the fact that Google admitted they were reading your emails for ad targeting purposes. To a lot of people like myself, this seemed a bridge too far when you’re used to servers that don’t “look” at your private stuff. But it certainly didn’t hurt Gmail’s adoption. (I still don’t use Gmail because of this original lingering distaste.)
And if you don't agree, just remember that my claim hinges on the definition of the words "you", "definition", "got" and "a".
Not really analogous.
You expect him to read the address not the content.
Maybe you don't mind if he reads the content sometimes but if he reads every postcard every time you would be pissed.
GitHub does all those things with your commits.