Concerning Privacy: add options to choose what could be shown on the contribution activity on the profile page

[grashaar]

[...] and how much details we want to show; or disable it entirely from the eye of other viewers.
And any API that requests this kind of information should respect the options we have set.

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i don't like it. i don't want people to be able to crawl that info, either, even through an API. it gets spammy when you make a lot of typo commits, PR merges, or open a lot of issues.

i don't mind the activity tab, but being able to see what people have done over the past year on any given date is creepy.

what i would really like is the two columns of popular repositories and repositories contributed to to be really long. way more interesting IMO. the repositories tab requires too much scrolling.

Mirgrate from isaacs/github#142

It seems the issue persisted over 7 years now should be addressed seriously. It is the right time to fix this, when privacy is the main concern of the internet world today.

Whether it is for the community or a renowned organization, I don't want people to track me around.

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Edit 1:
A related issue from 2016 isaacs/github#627

It surprises me that people has been raising this issue over all those years but nothing changes.

[erdo]

Most people are probably aware that this data could be compiled by a 3rd party and re-published, that's not the issue (at least for me). The ease with which this data is available to a casual observer of my page (my clients or employers for instance) is the thing that I dislike, and not having the autonomy to hide that data, even though I pay for my account is bizarre and insulting.

[ghost]

I also have been tracked. Someone saw my issue regarding reverse enginnering, and the original dev came to me and asked why I need his codes lol. I was surprised lol, so I had create a dummy account.
I hope this feature will be added ASAP

[whizzzkid]

I actually faced something similar recently, had to make my account private. Scary!

[shenlebantongying]

Other Reasons:

• Don't want to others know their "spam" contributions like fixing typos, translations, and mini fixes option to disable or hide contribution activity on the profile page isaacs/github#142
• Don't want to annoy their employer Contribution graph can be harmful to contributors isaacs/github#627
• Want more privacy I should be able to hide my profile activity heatmap isaacs/github#1840
• Dislike gamification Removing the childish contribution history graphics isaacs/github#1234
• Incorrect representation for open source contributions A message to recruiters regarding how to judge Github contributions. isaacs/github#1290
• etc.

[Levi-Lesches]

These issues had tons of support over at the old repo -- 1,750 upvotes between the issues linked above. GitHub, please take that into consideration here.

[LuciusV]

This is ridiculous, how you dare to not listen to community to that degree?

[crystalcommunication]

I agree with pretty much everything above. I understand that most of my contributions on GitHub are public anyway, and could easily be aggregated by a third party service crawling the site, but I find it deeply disturbing that anyone who stumbles across my GitHub profile can gather a great deal of information about me simply by clicking on my username and looking at the commits I've made to third-party repositories and issues I've opened. I don't care about internet clout, I just use this account to contribute to other projects that have chosen to use GitHub and I should have control over what information people can see on my profile page.

[thewhitegrizzli]

exactly my thoughts

[AndresSweeneyRios]

This is an important privacy issue IMO, why hasn't this been addressed yet?

[dingpanbao]

n years passed

[rt-hamilton]

Besides the already mentioned privacy concerns, one should also consider harmful consequences of (unnecessary?) gamification. GitHub already removed an existing profile "feature" some years ago, namely streaks. I don't think that they ever explained that decision publicly, but I guess that GitHub is aware of this issue. There are insights on how that design feature and the design change to user profiles influenced the behavior of developers on GitHub (see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.02371.pdf and https://github.com/lukasmoldon/GHStreaksThesis):

"The observed effects of the removal of the counters implies that platform designers have some responsibility to consider how the introduction of gamification elements steers behavior. [...] Our findings suggest that some users will change their behavior to collect digital tokens, but that this behavior may optimize for the game, and not necessarily for healthy and productive activity."

I think that this also applies to the remaining contribution calendar.

[ghost]

cirosantilli mentioned on the issue isaacs/github#1840 that GitHub admins actually already have a button to hide contribution activity. His profile (archived) still have entire contribution activity hidden as of 2022

Since Github still hasn't read this discussions, should we all contact Github to add an option to hide contribution activity for everyone?

[evi-liu]

👋 Hi folks, thanks for all of the feedback on this. We recently shipped Private Profiles, which enables you to hide your contributions, activity, and social features from your GitHub profile.

You can read more at our Changelog: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-04-21-private-profiles/

[grashaar]

Hi. I welcome the attempt to fix this. But I won't call this a good answer to the issue. Certainly I don't want my profile to be private, I want people to see my pins on the overview page. But I also want to hide the contribution activity and graph from the public eyes. Profile overview is fine, but the contribution activity and graph is not.

[ghost]

Hi. I welcome the attempt to fix this. But I won't call this a good answer to the issue. Certainly I don't want my profile to be private, I want people to see my pins on the overview page. But I also want to hide the contribution activity and graph from the public eyes. Profile overview is fine, but the contribution activity and graph is not.

I agree with you, I only want to hide my contribution activity

[ronaldaug]

It'd be great without hiding pinned repos. The rest are just fine. 👍

[z4cki]

yep, I only want to hide my contribution activity +1

[ghost]

I like it. There is always room for improvement, but I appreciate that we now have this option. Thanks @evi-liu!

[wassimchouchen]

take a llook this may help you understanding the hole issue : https://github.blog/changelog/2022-04-21-private-profiles/

[whizzzkid]

The original issue was posted 9+ years ago and I am surprised it's took the maintainers this long to arrive to a conclusion.

The profile pages are essentially broken, the private profile feature is all or nothing. I would like to show my pins, my achievements, devs I sponsor, even the contribution graph. The contribution activity on the other hand is a bit too verbose for me, creepy, if I must say. The only solution is to make my profile private. That makes everything private (even if other options like show achievements is on), that's a bad UX.

I would like to understand what's missing to implement a toggle on per component basis, we're all devs maybe we can help?

Please fix this or ask community for help!

[whizzzkid]

At least we're on Page 1 for issues that have not been answered and are not feedback for beta: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions?discussions_q=sort%3Atop+is%3Aunanswered+-label%3ABeta+ I am not even sure if @github-staff is active on these issues or uses these to prioritize their work.

[strlns]

I'm especially infuriated that GitHub forcibly collects and publishes a push-history, independent from the repository graph.

This makes sense for professional PR workflows, but should be opt-out and controllable by the repository owner.

Git repositories by themselves allows to "rewrite history".

But the "activity" widget shows multiple "commits" when amending and force-pushing repeatedly.

No where have I been told that GitHub publishes information about me that is not even in git index of the corresponding reposity.
This feels like it could almost be illegal in Europe. [^1]

What's next, a "currently online" or "last online" display without possibility to opt out?

GitHub needs more competition, soon.
This makes me start to regret choosing GitHub free tier at all for personal projects.
Unfortunately the network effect makes it very compelling.

[1] Addendum:

It might also be a sign that using GitHub for personal projects is simply a bad idea.

It should be clear to everyone at this point that the code you push to GitHub is not fully owned by you.

Your code snippets or derived work might be regurgitated at any time by Copilot or other MS products, derived DNN weights might even be sold.

For public repositories, the problem I described above is similar to edit histories for discussion posts. Opinions may differ a lot on what is sensible.

[whizzzkid]

One more thing, this info is parsed by google too:

So unless your info is private, this shows up on google search, what an invasion of privacy.

[MarcvdSluys]

This issue seems to have been around for about 10 years (at least), and I won't be surprised if it will be for another decade. Meanwile, I have decided to write a small Python script to confuse the Contributions calendar with fake git commits: https://github.com/MarcvdSluys/fake-commits

[whizzzkid]

make this a github action that auto-triggers.

[subham8907]

can we make tool get accurate contributors

[kasyan1337]

I'd personally really like to keep my contribution graph public without showing my entire activity history underneath it. Could we get a simple toggle to hide the detailed Contribution activity section while keeping the graph visible? Ideally, we could also choose which activities or repositories appear.

Making the entire profile private seems excessive when all I want is a bit more control over what you showcase.

Surprised this still isn't an option after so many years.