GitHub’s site policy updates are ready for your feedback

We regularly update our policies to reflect the evolution of our products, legal requirements, clarification requests, and user feedback. We’re currently updating a number of these policies including our Privacy Statement, Subprocessors and Cookies Policy, Terms of Service, and Corporate Terms of Service. For example, we’re updating our privacy policies to account for potential developments like Brexit and changes in our use of cookies and subprocessors. We’re also clarifying prohibited uses of GitHub due to export controls and sanctions laws, and content restrictions related to acceptable use.

The changes we’re making are in newly-opened pull requests for each policy in our Site Policy Repository. You can see the changes there and make comments, just like in any other pull request. This comment period starts today and ends on April 12 at 5 pm PT. We’ll take a week after that to go through all of your comments and carefully consider making further improvements. Then, on April 19, we’ll merge the new changes into master, and the new terms will become effective.

Explore the updates

Why we open our policies to feedback

There are two main reasons we update policies in this way. First, we want to make it easy on GitHub users—who are familiar with using pull requests to review code updates—to see exactly what has changed and understand the changes. Second, we’re all used to collaborating on open source projects to make them the best they can be. By turning our policies into open source projects, we’re making it easier for users to engage with our site policies.

How you can use our site policy project for your team

Our policies in the Site Policy Repository are all licensed CC0, so feel free to fork a copy to adapt for your own site. We’d love to hear if our project helped you create policy foundations for your organization, so let us know!

Learn more

Written by

Joe Mazzella

@bluemazzoo