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Comment by beaumartinez | Hacker News Reader

Hm, I'm divided on this. It's cool to be able to see what someone works most on... But at the same time, there's the privacy concern of being able to see what someone works most on. I'd like the ability to turn it off—hell, you can already decide what repos you expose to the public, so why not activity?

Of course, I realize that your activity on GitHub is public anyway—but it's never been so obvious.

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The privacy concern here seems just like the debate over the introduction of Facebook's newsfeed - that information was public, but not _obvious_.

It'd be enough to get me to switch to bitbucket. There wasn't really a Facebook alternative.

If you visit your "contributions" page while you are logged out, you will notice that all non-public activity is hidden.

I feel that you've raised a valid concern -- for the sake of privacy it would be best to have the option to deactivate this feature.

> If you visit your "contributions" page while you are logged out, you will notice that all non-public activity is hidden.

This wasn't immediately clear to me, so I had to test it out with Incognito. As it is, my own view of my profile is dominated by repositories from my prior business for which I no longer have access to on GitHub.

In general, I'd really prefer to be able to see my public profile. I guess it makes sense to let people know how much I contribute privately, but I want to be able to audit my public persona in much the same way Facebook has "View Profile As ____".

Maybe just a simple "View Public?" checkbox on the page itself would do. I agree - I have to check incognito if I want to see what I've actually done the most work on that everyone sees.

you are right to be concerned tho - despite the data originally being public, a collected view of public data (that wasn't easy to collect previously) can give new information.

The best way to solve this is if via some sort of toggle to turn off the view. Or, with more engineering effort, toggle each individual contributions that you don't want in the collated view.

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