GitHub Privacy Statement

Effective date: October 2, 2020

Thanks for entrusting GitHub Inc. (“GitHub”, “we”) 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.

All capitalized terms have their definition in GitHub’s Terms of Service, unless otherwise noted here.

The short version

We use your personal information as this Privacy Statement describes. No matter where you are, where you live, or what your citizenship is, we provide the same 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 and the Summary below don't tell you everything, so please read on for more details.

Summary

GitHub Privacy Statement

What information GitHub collects

"User Personal Information" is any information about one of our Users which could, alone or together with other information, personally identify them or otherwise be reasonably linked or connected with them. Information such as a username and password, an email address, a real name, an Internet protocol (IP) address, and a photograph are examples of “User Personal Information.”

User Personal Information does not include aggregated, non-personally identifying information that does not identify a User or cannot otherwise be reasonably linked or connected with them. We may use such aggregated, non-personally identifying information for research purposes and to operate, analyze, improve, and optimize our Website and Service.

Information users provide directly to GitHub

Registration information

We require some basic information at the time of account creation. When you create your own username and password, we ask you for a valid email address.

Payment information

If you sign on to a paid Account with us, send funds through the GitHub Sponsors Program, or buy an application on GitHub Marketplace, we collect your full name, address, and credit card information or PayPal information. Please note, GitHub does not process or store your credit card information or PayPal information, but our third-party payment processor does.

If you list and sell an application on GitHub Marketplace, we require your banking information. If you raise funds through the GitHub Sponsors Program, we require some additional information through the registration process for you to participate in and receive funds through those services and for compliance purposes.

Profile information

You may choose to give us more information for your Account profile, 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. This information may include User Personal Information. Please note that your profile information may be visible to other Users of our Service.

Information GitHub automatically collects from your use of the Service

Transactional information

If you have a paid Account with us, sell an application listed on GitHub Marketplace, or raise funds through the GitHub Sponsors Program, we automatically collect certain information about your transactions on the Service, such as the date, time, and amount charged.

Usage information

If you're accessing our Service or Website, we automatically collect the same basic information that most services collect, subject, where necessary, to your consent. This includes information about how you use the Service, such as the pages you view, the referring site, your IP address and session information, and the date and time of each request. This is information we collect from every visitor to the Website, whether they have an Account or not. This information may include User Personal information.

Cookies and similar technologies information

As further described below, and subject, where applicable, to your consent, we automatically collect information from cookies and similar technologies (such as cookie ID and settings) to keep you logged in, to remember your preferences, and to identify you and your device.

Device information

We may collect certain information about your device, such as its IP address, browser or client application information, language preference, operating system and application version, device type and ID, and device model and manufacturer. This information may include User Personal information.

Information we collect from third parties

GitHub may collect User Personal Information from third parties. For example, this may happen if you sign up for training or to receive information about GitHub from one of our vendors, partners, or affiliates. GitHub does not purchase User Personal Information from third-party data brokers.

What information GitHub does not collect

We do not intentionally collect “Sensitive Personal Information”, such as personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation. If you choose to store any Sensitive Personal Information on our servers, you are responsible for complying with any regulatory controls regarding that data.

If you are 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 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. Different 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 have an Account on GitHub.

We do not intentionally collect User Personal Information that is stored in your repositories or other free-form content inputs. Any personal information within a user's repository is the responsibility of the repository owner.

How GitHub uses your information

• We may use your information for the following purposes:
• We use your Registration Information to create your account, and to provide you the Service.
• We use your Payment Information to provide you with the Paid Account service, the Marketplace service, the Sponsors Program, or any other GitHub paid service you request.
• We use your User Personal Information, specifically your username, to identify you on GitHub.
• We use your Profile Information to fill out your Account profile and to share that profile with other users if you ask us to.
• We 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 to respond to support requests.
• 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. We learn 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 may use User Personal Information to invite you to take part in surveys, beta programs, or other research projects, subject, where necessary, to your consent .
• We use Usage Information and Device Information to better understand how our Users use GitHub and to improve our Website and Service.
• We may use your User Personal Information if it is necessary for security purposes or to investigate possible fraud or attempts to harm GitHub or our Users.
• We may use your User Personal Information to comply with our legal obligations, protect our intellectual property, and enforce our Terms of Service.
• 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 bases for processing information

To the extent that our processing of your User Personal Information is subject to certain international laws (including, but not limited to, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (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:

• Contract Performance:
  • When you create a GitHub Account, you provide your Registration Information. We require this information for you to enter into the Terms of Service agreement with us, and we process that information on the basis of performing that contract. We also process your username and email address on other legal bases, as described below.
  • If you have a paid Account with us, we collect and process additional Payment Information on the basis of performing that contract.
  • When you buy or sell an application listed on our Marketplace or, when you send or receive funds through the GitHub Sponsors Program, we process Payment Information and additional elements in order to perform the contract that applies to those services.
• Consent:
  • We rely on your consent to use your User Personal Information under the following circumstances: when you fill out the information in your user profile; when you decide to participate in a GitHub training, research project, beta program, or survey; and for marketing purposes, where applicable. All of this User Personal 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. You may withdraw your consent at any time.
• Legitimate Interests:
  • Generally, the remainder of the processing of User Personal Information we perform is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interest, for example, for legal compliance purposes, security purposes, or to maintain ongoing confidentiality, integrity, availability, and resilience of GitHub’s systems, Website, and Service.
• If you would like to request deletion of data we process on the basis of consent or if you object to our processing of personal information, please use our Privacy contact form.

How we share the information we collect

We may share your User Personal Information with third parties under one of the following circumstances:

With your consent

We share your User Personal Information, if you consent, after letting you know what information will be shared, with whom, and why. For example, if you purchase an application listed on our Marketplace, we share your username to allow the application Developer to provide you with services. Additionally, you may direct us through your actions on GitHub to share your User Personal Information. For example, if you join an Organization, you indicate your willingness to provide the owner of the Organization with the ability to view your activity in the Organization’s access log.

With service providers

We share User Personal Information with a limited number of service providers who process it on our behalf to provide or improve our Service, and who have agreed to privacy restrictions similar to the ones in our Privacy Statement by signing data protection agreements or making similar commitments. Our service providers perform payment processing, customer support ticketing, network data transmission, security, and other similar services. While GitHub processes all User Personal Information in the United States, our service providers may process data outside of the United States or the European Union. If you would like to know who our service providers are, please see our page on Subprocessors.

For security purposes

If you are a member of an Organization, GitHub may share your username, Usage Information, and Device Information associated with that Organization with an owner and/or administrator of the Organization, to the extent that such information is provided only to investigate or respond to a security incident that affects or compromises the security of that particular Organization.

For legal disclosure

GitHub strives for transparency in complying with legal process and legal obligations. Unless prevented from doing so by law or court order, or in rare, exigent circumstances, we make a reasonable effort to notify users of any legally compelled or required disclosure of their information. GitHub may disclose User Personal Information or other information we collect about you to law enforcement if required in response to a valid subpoena, court order, search warrant, a similar government order, or when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to comply with our legal obligations, to protect our property or rights, or those of third parties or the public at large.

For more information about our disclosure in response to legal requests, see our Guidelines for Legal Requests of User Data.

Change in control or sale

We may share User Personal Information if we are involved in a merger, sale, or acquisition of corporate entities or business units. 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 made in our Privacy Statement or Terms of Service.

Aggregate, non-personally identifying information

We 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.

We do not sell your User Personal Information for monetary or other consideration.

Please note: The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”) requires businesses to state in their privacy policy whether or not they disclose personal information in exchange for monetary or other valuable consideration. While CCPA only covers California residents, we voluntarily extend its core rights for people to control their data to all of our users, not just those who live in California. You can learn more about the CCPA and how we comply with it here.

Other important information

Repository contents

GitHub personnel do not access private repositories unless required to for security purposes, to assist the repository owner with a support matter, to maintain the integrity of the Service, or to comply with our legal obligations. However, while we do not generally search for content in your repositories, we may scan our servers and content to detect certain tokens or security signatures, known active malware, or other content known to violate our Terms, such as violent extremist or terrorist content or child exploitation imagery based on algorithmic fingerprinting techniques. Our Terms of Service provides more details.

If your repository is public, anyone may view its contents. If you include private, confidential or Sensitive Personal Information, such as email addresses or passwords, in your public repository, that information may be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.

Please see more about User Personal Information in public repositories.

Public information on GitHub

Many of GitHub services and features are 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 User 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 to 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 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. If you have a complaint about any User 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 its 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 will be able to see your full email address(es) within that Organization's verified domain(s).

Please note, GitHub may share your username, Usage Information, and Device Information with the owner(s) of the Organization you are a member of, to the extent that your User Personal Information is provided only to investigate or respond to a security incident that affects or compromises the security of that particular Organization.

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 governs in the event of 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 might process your User Personal Information in their Organization and the ways for you to access, update, alter, or delete the User Personal Information stored in the Account.

Additional services

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 with 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 User Personal Information from visitors to your GitHub Pages website, including logs of visitor IP addresses, to comply with legal obligations, and to maintain the security and integrity of the Website and the Service.

GitHub applications

You can also add applications from GitHub, such as our Desktop app, our Atom application, or other application and 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 collect the 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 keeping your information current, or by contacting GitHub Support or GitHub Premium Support.

If GitHub processes information about you, such as information GitHub receives from third parties, and you do not have an account, then you may, subject to applicable law, 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 information we have about you.

Data retention and deletion of data

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

If you would like to cancel your account or delete your User Personal Information, you may do so in your user profile. We 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 of your request. 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 de-identify your User Personal Information, including your username and email address, from the author field of issues, pull requests, and comments by associating them with a ghost user.

That said, the email address you have supplied via your Git commit settings will always be associated with your commits in the Git system. If you choose 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 and similar technologies (collectively, “cookies”) to make interactions with our service easy and meaningful. Cookies are small text files that websites often store on computer hard drives or mobile devices of visitors. We use cookies to provide you our services, for example, to keep you logged in, remember your preferences, identify your device for security purposes, and provide information for future development of GitHub. 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.

We provide more information about cookies on GitHub on our GitHub Subprocessors and Cookies page that describes the cookies we set, the needs we have for those cookies, and the expiration of such cookies. It also lists our third-party analytics providers and how you can control your cookie preference settings for such cookies.

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 User 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. You can read more about DNT in our Tracking on GitHub section of our GitHub Subprocessors and Cookies page.

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 (TLS), and git repository content is encrypted at rest. We manage our own cages and racks at top-tier data centers with high level of 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

GitHub, Inc. and, for those in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, GitHub B.V. are the controllers responsible for the processing of your personal information in connection with the Service, except (a) with respect to personal information that was added to a repository by its contributors, in which case the owner of that repository is the controller and GitHub is the processor (or, if the owner acts as a processor, GitHub will be the subprocessor); or (b) when you and GitHub have entered into a separate agreement that covers data privacy (such as a Data Processing Agreement).

Our addresses are:

• GitHub, Inc., 88 Colin P. Kelly Jr. Street, San Francisco, CA 94107.
• GitHub B.V., Vijzelstraat 68-72, 1017 HL Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

We store and process the information that we collect in the United States in accordance with this Privacy Statement, though our service providers 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 the same 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, specific, and freely given consent at the time of data collection, when we collect your User Personal Information using consent as a basis.
• We collect only the minimum amount of User 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, altering, or deleting the User Personal Information we have collected, where legally permitted.
• We provide our Users notice, choice, accountability, security, and access regarding their User Personal Information, and we limit the purpose for processing it. We also provide our Users a method of recourse and enforcement.

Cross-border data transfers

GitHub processes personal information both inside and outside of the United States and relies on Standard Contractual Clauses as the legally provided mechanism to lawfully transfer data from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland to the United States. In addition, GitHub is certified to the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Frameworks. To learn more about our cross-border data transfers, see our Global Privacy Practices.

How we communicate with you

We 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 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 to 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 cannot 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 to opt out of other communications.

Our emails may 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. Additionally, if you are a resident of an EU member state, you have the right to file a complaint with your local supervisory authority, and you might have more options.

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 are not material changes or that do not affect your rights, we encourage Users 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.

Translations

Below are translations of this document into other languages. In the event of any conflict, uncertainty, or apparent inconsistency between any of those versions and the English version, this English version is the controlling version.

French

Cliquez ici pour obtenir la version française: Déclaration de confidentialité de GitHub

Other translations

For translations of this statement into other languages, please visit https://docs.github.com/ and select a language from the drop-down menu under “English.”