GitHub Privacy Statement

Effective date: April 19, 2019

Thanks for entrusting GitHub with your source code, your projects, and your personal information. Holding on to your private information is a serious responsibility, and we want you to know how we're handling it.

The short version

We only collect the information you choose to give us, and we process it with your consent, or on another legal basis; we only require the minimum amount of personal information that is necessary to fulfill the purpose of your interaction with us; we don't sell it to third parties; and we only use it as this Privacy Statement describes. If you're visiting us from the European Union (EU), European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland, or the United Kingdom (UK), please see our global privacy practices: we comply with the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework and we are compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). No matter where you are, where you live, or what your citizenship is, we provide a high standard of privacy protection to all our users around the world, regardless of their country of origin or location.

Of course, the short version doesn't tell you everything, so please read on for more details!

Summary

GitHub Privacy Statement

What information GitHub collects and why

Categories of personal information

"User Personal Information" is any personal information about one of our users which could, alone or together with other information, personally identify them. Information such as a user name and password, an email address, a real name, and a photograph are examples of “User Personal Information.” User Personal Information includes Personal Data as defined in the General Data Protection Regulation.

"Technical Information" may include information we collect from website browsers, such as web server logs, or other log information, such as User session or activity logs. Technical Information may be connected to User Personal Information such as a username or an email address, or to other potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

User Personal Information does not include aggregated, non-personally identifying information. We may use aggregated, non-personally identifying information to operate, analyze, improve, and optimize our website and service.

Information from users with accounts

If you create an account, we require some basic information at the time of account creation. You will create your own user name and password, and we will ask you for a valid email address. You also have the option to give us more information if you want to, and this may include "User Personal Information."

Information from website browsers

If you're just browsing the website, we collect the same basic information that most websites collect. We use common internet technologies, such as cookies and web server logs, to collect Technical Information. This is stuff we collect from everybody, whether they have an account or not.

The information we collect about all visitors to our website includes the visitor’s browser type, language preference, referring site, additional websites requested, and the date and time of each visitor request. We also collect potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

Information we collect from third parties

From time to time, GitHub receives personal information about individuals from third parties. This may happen if you sign up for a training or to receive information about GitHub from one of our vendors.

Why we collect this information

• We need your User Personal Information to create your account, and to provide the services you request, including to provide the GitHub service, the Marketplace service, or to respond to support requests.
• We use your User Personal Information, specifically your user name, to identify you on GitHub.
• We use it to fill out your profile and share that profile with other users if you ask us to.
• We will use your email address to communicate with you, if you've said that's okay, and only for the reasons you’ve said that’s okay. Please see our section on email communication for more information.
• We use User Personal Information and other data to make recommendations for you, such as to suggest projects you may want to follow or contribute to. For example, when you fill out an interest survey at account creation, we learn from it — as well as from your public behavior on GitHub, such as the projects you star — to determine your coding interests, and we recommend similar projects. These recommendations are automated decisions, but they have no legal impact on your rights.
• We collect Technical Information to better understand how our website visitors use GitHub, and to monitor and protect the security of the website.
• We collect personal information from third parties for the purposes for which it was authorized to be collected. For example, you may authorize GitHub to contact you for marketing purposes via a third party's platform. If we need to use your personal information for other purposes, we will ask your permission first.
• We use your User Personal Information and Technical Information for internal purposes, such as to maintain logs for security reasons, for training purposes, and for legal documentation and compliance.
• We limit our use of your User Personal Information to the purposes listed in this Privacy Statement. If we need to use your User Personal Information for other purposes, we will ask your permission first. You can always see what information we have, how we're using it, and what permissions you have given us in your user profile.

Our legal basis for processing information

Under certain international laws (including GDPR), GitHub is required to notify you about the legal basis on which we process User Personal Information. GitHub processes User Personal Information on the following legal bases:

• When you create a GitHub account, you provide your user name and an email address. We require those data elements for you to enter into the Terms of Service agreement with us, and we process those elements on the basis of performing that contract. We also process your user name and email address on other bases. If you have a GitHub Hosted, GitHub Enterprise Server, or other paid account with us, there will be other data elements we must collect and process on the basis of performing that contract. GitHub does not collect or process a credit card number, but our third-party payment processor does.
• As a user, you can fill out the information in your user profile, and you have the option to provide User Personal Information such as your full name, an avatar which may include a photograph, your biography, your location, your company, and a URL to a third party website. You also have the option of setting a publicly visible email address here. If you decide to participate in a GitHub research project or survey, you may choose to provide User Personal Information or other personal information to us for limited purposes. We process this information on the basis of consent. All of this information is entirely optional, and you have the ability to access, modify, and delete it at any time (while you are not able to delete your email address entirely, you can make it private).
• Generally, the remainder of the processing of personal information we perform is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests. For example, for legal compliance purposes or to maintain ongoing confidentiality, integrity, availability and resilience of GitHub's systems, website, and service, we must keep logs of Technical Information; and, in order to respond to legal process, we are required to keep records of users who have sent and received DMCA takedown notices.
• If you would like to request erasure of data we process on the basis of consent or object to our processing of personal information, please use our Privacy contact form.

What information GitHub does not collect

We do not intentionally collect sensitive personal information, such as social security numbers, genetic data, health information, or religious information. Although GitHub does not request or intentionally collect any sensitive personal information, we realize that you might store this kind of information in your account, such as in a repository or in your public profile. If you store any sensitive personal information on our servers, you are responsible for complying with any regulatory controls regarding that data.

If you're a child under the age of 13, you may not have an account on GitHub. GitHub does not knowingly collect information from or direct any of our content specifically to children under 13. If we learn or have reason to suspect that you are a user who is under the age of 13, we will unfortunately have to close your account. We don't want to discourage you from learning to code, but those are the rules. Please see our Terms of Service for information about account termination. Other countries may have different minimum age limits, and if you are below the minimum age for providing consent for data collection in your country, you may not use GitHub without obtaining your parents' or legal guardians' consent.

We do not intentionally collect User Personal Information that is stored in your repositories or other free-form content inputs. Information in your repositories belongs to you, and you are responsible for it, as well as for making sure that your content complies with our Terms of Service. Any personal information within a user's repository is the responsibility of the repository owner.

Repository contents

GitHub employees do not access private repositories unless required to for security reasons, to assist the repository owner with a support matter, or to maintain the integrity of the service. Our Terms of Service provides more details.

If your repository is public, anyone (including us and unaffiliated third parties) may view its contents. If you have included private or sensitive information in your public repository, such as email addresses or passwords, that information may be indexed by search engines or used by third parties. In addition, while we do not generally search for content in your repositories, we may scan our servers for certain tokens or security signatures, or for known active malware.

Please see more about User Personal Information in public repositories.

How we share the information we collect

We do share User Personal Information with your permission, so we can perform services you have requested or communicate on your behalf. For example, if you purchase an integration or other Developer Product from our Marketplace, we will share your account name to allow the integrator to provide you services. Additionally, you may indicate, through your actions on GitHub, that you are willing to share your User Personal Information. For example, if you join an organization, the owner of the organization will have the ability to view your activity in the organization's access log. We will respect your choices.

We do not share, sell, rent, or trade User Personal Information with third parties for their commercial purposes, except where you have specifically told us to (such as by buying an integration from Marketplace).

We do not host advertising on GitHub. We may occasionally embed content from third party sites, such as YouTube, and that content may include ads. While we try to minimize the amount of ads our embedded content contains, we can't always control what third parties show. Any advertisements on individual GitHub Pages or in GitHub repositories are not sponsored by, or tracked by, GitHub.

We do not disclose User Personal Information outside GitHub, except in the situations listed in this section or in the section below on Compelled Disclosure.

We do share certain aggregated, non-personally identifying information with others about how our users, collectively, use GitHub, or how our users respond to our other offerings, such as our conferences or events. For example, we may compile statistics on the usage of open source licenses across GitHub. However, we do not sell this information to advertisers or marketers.

We do share User Personal Information with a limited number of third party vendors who process it on our behalf to provide or improve our service, and who have agreed to privacy restrictions similar to our own Privacy Statement by signing data protection agreements. Our vendors perform services such as payment processing, customer support ticketing, network data transmission, and other similar services. When we transfer your data to our vendors under EU-US Privacy Shield Framework, we remain responsible for it. While GitHub processes all User Personal Information in the United States, our third party vendors may process data outside of the United States or the European Union. If you would like to know who our third party vendors are, please see our page on Subprocessors.

We do share aggregated, non-personally identifying information with third parties. For example, we share the number of stars on a repository, or in the event of a security incident, we may share the number of times a particular file was accessed.

We may share User Personal Information if we are involved in a merger, sale, or acquisition. If any such change of ownership happens, we will ensure that it is under terms that preserve the confidentiality of User Personal Information, and we will notify you on our website or by email before any transfer of your User Personal Information. The organization receiving any User Personal Information will have to honor any promises we have made in our Privacy Statement or in our Terms of Service.

Public information on GitHub

Much of GitHub is public-facing. If your content is public-facing, third parties may access and use it in compliance with our Terms of Service, such as by viewing your profile or repositories or pulling data via our API. We do not sell that content; it is yours. However, we do allow third parties, such as research organizations or archives, to compile public-facing GitHub information. Other third parties, such as data brokers, have been known to scrape GitHub and compile data as well.

Your User Personal Information, associated with your content, could be gathered by third parties in these compilations of GitHub data. If you do not want your User Personal Information to appear in third parties’ compilations of GitHub data, please do not make your personal information publicly available and be sure to configure your email address to be private in your user profile and in your git commit settings. We currently set users' email address private by default, but legacy GitHub users may need to update their settings.

If you would like to compile GitHub data, you must comply with our Terms of Service regarding scraping and privacy, and you may only use any public-facing User Personal Information you gather for the purpose for which our user has authorized it. For example, where a GitHub user has made an email address public-facing for the purpose of identification and attribution, do not use that email address for commercial advertising. We expect you to reasonably secure any User Personal Information you have gathered from GitHub, and to respond promptly to complaints, removal requests, and "do not contact" requests from GitHub or GitHub users.

Similarly, projects on GitHub may include publicly available User Personal Information collected as part of the collaborative process. In the event that a GitHub project contains publicly available personal information that does not belong to GitHub users, we will only use that personal information for the limited purpose for which it was collected, and we will secure that personal information as we would secure any User Personal Information. If you have a complaint about any personal information on GitHub, please see our section on resolving complaints.

Organizations

You may indicate, through your actions on GitHub, that you are willing to share your User Personal Information. If you collaborate on or become a member of an organization, then the Account owners may receive your User Personal Information. When you accept an invitation to an organization, you will be notified of the types of information owners may be able to see (for more information, see About Organization Membership). If you accept an invitation to an organization with a verified domain, then the owners of that organization may be able to see your full email address(es) within that organization's verified domain(s).

If you collaborate on or become a member of an Account that has agreed to the Corporate Terms of Service and a Data Protection Addendum ("DPA") to this Privacy Statement, then that DPA will govern any conflicts between this Privacy Statement and the DPA with respect to your activity in the Account.

Please contact the Account owners for more information about how they process your User Personal Information and the ways for you to access, update, alter, or delete the User Personal Information stored in that account.

Third party applications

You have the option of enabling or adding third party applications, known as "Developer Products," to your account. These Developer Products are not necessary for your use of GitHub. We will share your User Personal Information to third parties when you ask us to, such as by purchasing a Developer Product from the Marketplace; however, you are responsible for your use of the third party Developer Product and for the amount of User Personal Information you choose to share with it. You can check our API documentation to see what information is provided when you authenticate into a Developer Product using your GitHub profile.

GitHub Pages

If you create a GitHub Pages website, it is your responsibility to post a privacy statement that accurately describes how you collect, use, and share personal information and other visitor information, and how you comply with applicable data privacy laws, rules, and regulations. Please note that GitHub may collect Technical Information from visitors to your GitHub Pages website, including logs of visitor IP addresses, to maintain the security and integrity of the website and service.

GitHub applications

You can also add applications from GitHub, such as our Desktop app, our Electron or Atom applications, or other account features, to your account. These applications each have their own terms and may collect different kinds of User Personal Information; however, all GitHub applications are subject to this Privacy Statement, and we will always collect the minimum amount of User Personal Information necessary, and use it only for the purpose for which you have given it to us.

How you can access and control the information we collect

If you're already a GitHub user, you may access, update, alter, or delete your basic user profile information by editing your user profile or contacting GitHub Support or GitHub Premium Support. You can control the information we collect about you by limiting what information is in your profile, by updating out of date information, or by contacting GitHub Support or GitHub Premium Support.

If GitHub processes information about you and you do not have an account, such as information GitHub receives from third parties, then you may access, update, alter, delete, or object to the processing of your personal information by contacting GitHub Support or GitHub Premium Support.

Data portability

As a GitHub User, you can always take your data with you. You can clone your repositories to your desktop, for example, or you can use our Data Portability tools to download all of the data we have about you.

Data retention and deletion of data

Generally, GitHub will retain User Personal Information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services.

We may retain certain User Personal Information indefinitely, unless you delete it or request its deletion. For example, we don’t automatically delete inactive user accounts, so unless you choose to delete your account, we will retain your account information indefinitely.

If you would like to cancel your account or delete your User Personal Information, you may do so in your user profile. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements, but barring legal requirements, we will delete your full profile (within reason) within 90 days. You may contact GitHub Support or GitHub Premium Support to request the erasure of the data we process on the basis of consent within 30 days.

After an account has been deleted, certain data, such as contributions to other users' repositories and comments in others' issues, will remain. However, we will delete or deidentify your personal information, including your user name and email address, from the author field of issues, pull requests, and comments by associating them with the ghost user.

The email address you have supplied via your Git commit settings will always be associated with your commits in the Git system. If you chose to make your email address private, you should also update your Git commit settings. We are unable to change or delete data in the Git commit history — the Git software is designed to maintain a record — but we do enable you to control what information you put in that record.

Our use of cookies and tracking

Cookies

GitHub uses cookies to make interactions with our service easy and meaningful. We use cookies (and similar technologies, like HTML5 localStorage) to keep you logged in, remember your preferences, and provide information for future development of GitHub. For security reasons, we use cookies to identify a device. By using our website, you agree that we can place these types of cookies on your computer or device. If you disable your browser or device’s ability to accept these cookies, you will not be able to log in or use GitHub’s services. On certain areas of the website, we may also use cookies to identify you and/or your device to advertise GitHub products and services to you on third party sites.

We provide a web page on cookies and tracking that describes the cookies we set, the needs we have for those cookies, and the types of cookies they are (temporary or permanent). It also lists our third party analytics providers and subprocessors, and details exactly which parts of our website we permit them to track.

Tracking and analytics

We use a number of third party analytics and service providers to help us evaluate our users' use of GitHub; compile statistical reports on activity; and improve our content and website performance. We only use these third party analytics providers on certain areas of our website, and all of them have signed data protection agreements with us that limit the type of personal information they can collect and the purpose for which they can process the information. In addition, we use our own internal analytics software to provide features and improve our content and performance.

Some browsers have incorporated "Do Not Track" (DNT) features that can send a signal to the websites you visit indicating you do not wish to be tracked. GitHub responds to browser DNT signals and follows the W3C standard for responding to DNT signals. If you have not enabled DNT on a browser that supports it, cookies on some parts of our website will track your online browsing activity on other online services over time, though we do not permit third parties other than our analytics and service providers to track GitHub users' activity over time on GitHub.

How GitHub secures your information

GitHub takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect User Personal Information from unauthorized access, alteration, or destruction; maintain data accuracy; and help ensure the appropriate use of User Personal Information.

GitHub enforces a written security information program. Our program:

• aligns with industry recognized frameworks;
• includes security safeguards reasonably designed to protect the confidentiality, integrity, availability, and resilience of our users' data;
• is appropriate to the nature, size, and complexity of GitHub’s business operations;
• includes incident response and data breach notification processes; and
• complies with applicable information security related laws and regulations in the geographic regions where GitHub does business.

In the event of a data breach that affects your User Personal Information, we will act promptly to mitigate the impact of a breach and notify any affected users without undue delay.

Transmission of data on GitHub is encrypted using SSH, HTTPS, and SSL/TLS. While our data is not encrypted at rest, we manage our own cages and racks at top-tier data centers with excellent physical and network security, and when data is stored with a third party storage provider, it is encrypted.

No method of transmission, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure. Therefore, we cannot guarantee its absolute security. For more information, see our security disclosures.

GitHub's global privacy practices

We store and process the information that we collect in the United States in accordance with this Privacy Statement (our subprocessors may store and process data outside the United States). However, we understand that we have users from different countries and regions with different privacy expectations, and we try to meet those needs even when the United States does not have the same privacy framework as other countries'.

We provide a high standard of privacy protection — as described in this Privacy Statement — to all our users around the world, regardless of their country of origin or location, and we are proud of the levels of notice, choice, accountability, security, data integrity, access, and recourse we provide. We work hard to comply with the applicable data privacy laws wherever we do business, working with our Data Protection Officer as part of a cross-functional team that oversees our privacy compliance efforts. Additionally, if our vendors or affiliates have access to User Personal Information, they must sign agreements that require them to comply with our privacy policies and with applicable data privacy laws.

In particular:

• GitHub provides clear methods of unambiguous, informed consent at the time of data collection, when we do collect your personal information using consent as a basis.
• We collect only the minimum amount of personal information necessary for our purposes, unless you choose to provide more. We encourage you to only give us the amount of data you are comfortable sharing.
• We offer you simple methods of accessing, correcting, or deleting the User Personal Information we have collected.
• We provide our users notice, choice, accountability, security, and access, and we limit the purpose for processing. We also provide our users a method of recourse and enforcement. These are the Privacy Shield Principles, but they are also just good practices.

Cross-border data transfers

For cross-border data transfers from the EU, the European Economic Area (EEA), and UK, GitHub adheres to the Privacy Shield Framework. You may view our EU-US certification entry in the Privacy Shield List.

In addition to providing our users methods of unambiguous, informed consent and control over their data, we participate in and comply with the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework, and we are committed to subject any personal information we receive from the EU, EEA, and the United Kingdom to the Privacy Shield Principles.

How we respond to compelled disclosure

GitHub may disclose personally-identifying information or other information we collect about you to law enforcement in response to a valid subpoena, court order, warrant, or similar government order, or when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect our property or rights, or those of third parties or the public at large.

In complying with court orders and similar legal processes, GitHub strives for transparency. When permitted, we will make a reasonable effort to notify users of any disclosure of their information, unless we are prohibited by law or court order from doing so, or in rare, exigent circumstances.

For more information, see our Guidelines for Legal Requests of User Data.

How we, and others, communicate with you

We will use your email address to communicate with you, if you've said that's okay, and only for the reasons you’ve said that’s okay. For example, if you contact our Support team with a request, we will respond to you via email. You have a lot of control over how your email address is used and shared on and through GitHub. You may manage your communication preferences in your user profile.

By design, the Git version control system associates many actions with a user's email address, such as commit messages. We are not able to change many aspects of the Git system. If you would like your email address to remain private, even when you’re commenting on public repositories, you can create a private email address in your user profile. You should also update your local Git configuration to use your private email address. This will not change how we contact you, but it will affect how others see you. We set current users' email address private by default, but legacy GitHub users may need to update their settings. Please see more about email addresses in commit messages here.

Depending on your email settings, GitHub may occasionally send notification emails about changes in a repository you’re watching, new features, requests for feedback, important policy changes, or offer customer support. We also send marketing emails, based on your choices and in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. There's an unsubscribe link located at the bottom of each of the marketing emails we send you. Please note that you can not opt out of receiving important communications from us, such as emails from our Support team or system emails, but you can configure your notifications settings in your profile.

Our emails might contain a pixel tag, which is a small, clear image that can tell us whether or not you have opened an email and what your IP address is. We use this pixel tag to make our email more effective for you and to make sure we’re not sending you unwanted email.

Resolving complaints

If you have concerns about the way GitHub is handling your User Personal Information, please let us know immediately. We want to help. You may contact us by filling out the Privacy contact form. You may also email us directly at [email protected] with the subject line "Privacy Concerns." We will respond promptly — within 45 days at the latest.

You may also contact our Data Protection Officer directly.

Dispute resolution process

In the unlikely event that a dispute arises between you and GitHub regarding our handling of your User Personal Information, we will do our best to resolve it. If we cannot, we have selected JAMS, an independent dispute resolution provider, to handle unresolved Privacy Shield complaints. If we are unable to resolve your concerns after a good faith effort to address them, you may contact JAMS and submit a Privacy Shield claim. JAMS is a US-based private alternate dispute resolution provider, and we have contracted with JAMS to provide an independent recourse mechanism for any of our users for privacy concerns at no cost to you. You do not need to appear in court; you may conduct this dispute resolution process via telephone or video conference. If you are not based in the EU, EEA, Switzerland, or the UK, but you would still like to use the JAMS arbitration process to resolve your dispute, please let us know and we will provide access to you.

Additionally, if you are a resident of an EU member state, you have the right to file a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

Independent arbitration

Under certain limited circumstances, EU, EEA, Swiss, and UK individuals may invoke binding Privacy Shield arbitration as a last resort if all other forms of dispute resolution have been unsuccessful. To learn more about this method of resolution and its availability to you, please read more about Privacy Shield. Arbitration is not mandatory; it is a tool you can use if you choose to.

We are subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission.

Changes to our Privacy Statement

Although most changes are likely to be minor, GitHub may change our Privacy Statement from time to time. We will provide notification to Users of material changes to this Privacy Statement through our Website at least 30 days prior to the change taking effect by posting a notice on our home page or sending email to the primary email address specified in your GitHub account. We will also update our Site Policy repository, which tracks all changes to this policy. For changes to this Privacy Statement that do not affect your rights, we encourage visitors to check our Site Policy repository frequently.

License

This Privacy Statement is licensed under this Creative Commons Zero license. For details, see our site-policy repository.

Contacting GitHub

Questions regarding GitHub's Privacy Statement or information practices should be directed to our Privacy contact form.

For a French translation, click here and cliquez ici pour francais: GitHub Privacy Statement/Déclaration de confidentialité de GitHub