Updates to our Terms of Service and Privacy Statement

We regularly update our policies to reflect the evolution of our products, or in response to changing legal requirements, clarification requests, or user feedback. In this update, we’ve made some changes to our Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, and other site policies. 

We welcome your feedback in our site-policy repository, where we’ve open-sourced the policies that govern the use of GitHub.com. We periodically open pull requests in our site-policy repository to develop and make updates collaboratively with our community. We’ve updated two sets of policies: our legal terms, which became effective on November 13, and Privacy Statement and Acceptable Use Policies, which take effect December 20, after a 30-day notice and comment period.

Updates to our legal terms

Yesterday, we published updates to our Terms of Service, Corporate Terms of Service, Enterprise Subscription Agreement, Enterprise Cloud Addendum, and Enterprise Server License Agreement to reflect the new products and services we’ve just released. These updates include new terms related to GitHub Actions, Packages, and Advanced Security, in addition to some restructuring to enhance ease of use. The restructuring includes the creation of Additional Product Terms covering any products provided in addition to GitHub’s core products and services. These updated terms are effective as of November 13, and will be incorporated into your existing terms as applicable.

Updates to our Privacy Statement and Acceptable Use Policies

We’ve also proposed updates to our Privacy Statement and Acceptable Use Policies. These include changes to our Privacy Statement as part of our preparation for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which goes into effect in January. The updates to our Acceptable Use Policies cover new products and features.

For each of these policies, we also reorganized some sections to present the information with an enhanced flow. Other changes reflect our increasing focus on the security of our platform and services.

Learn more about the updates

Why we open our policies to feedback

There are two main reasons we update policies in this way:

• We want to make it easy for users to review and understand changes.
• By turning our policies into open source projects, users can collaborate and engage with our site policies similarly to how we work together on open source projects.

Repurpose our site policy project for your team

Since our policies in the site-policy repository are all licensed CC0, you’re free to fork a copy to adapt for your own uses. If our project helped you create policy foundations for your organization, we’d love to hear about it.

How you can get involved

We welcome input on the policies in our site-policy repository at any time, but we periodically post upcoming changes 30 days in advance so that we can get your input when there are substantial changes to a policy. We’re open to your feedback to make our site policies the best versions they can be.

Comment on the site-policy repository’s pull requests

The comment period starts today, and ends on December 15, at 5 pm PT. We’ll take a week after the period ends to review your comments and carefully consider making further improvements before merging any new changes into master. Updates to the Privacy Statement and Acceptable Use Policies will go into effect on December 20.

If you’re shaping policies for an organization, you’re welcome to fork a copy of our policies and adapt them for your goals.

Get involved with our policies

Written by

Fred Jennings

@F-Jennings