[Brett] >> If GitHub turns evil, it will be most likely by selling this >> nicely packaged information to recruiters. It's too late to move >> away then, the statistics will have been collected already.
Do their terms of service even allow for that, or is this just speculation on your part?
When exploring a worst case scenario, some level of speculation is probably inevitable. The guideline "if a service is free, you are the product" is pretty well established -- I cannot think of an example where it has actually been refuted. I do not know whether explicit permission to resell data that is technically public is required in the U.S. Note that while the data is "public", data mining GitHub by third parties seems to be forbidden. GitHub's TOS appear to be entirely silent on the subject, but they are already publishing aggregate data like https://github.com/torvalds , which by my (European) privacy point of view is already stretching and exceeding the limits of good taste. Stefan Krah