: Opt-out instructions included if you're not keen on GitHub watching you in the name of product improvement
Users of GitHub's command-line interface who value privacy, beware. The Microsoft-owned code-hosting platform has quietly begun collecting pseudonymous client-side telemetry from CLI users and enabled it by default.
There was no standalone blog post or announcement of the change, just an update to GitHub's CLI documentation adding aover the past week folding telemetry features into the tool. GitHub's explanation for the telemetry update was straightforward: it said the data would help the team understand feature use and improve the CLI.
"As agentic adoption of GitHub CLI grows, our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice," the telemetry page reads. "We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. " Real users, in this case, appear to include AI agents.
A GitHub spokesperson offered the following statement:"GitHub CLI now includes client-side usage telemetry, beginning with the v2.91.0 release today, to better understand how developers use the tool across both interactive and increasingly agentic workflows. Telemetry is enabled by default with a clear opt-out. These insights will help the team identify friction points and prioritize the features that matter most, particularly as usage patterns evolve with the rise of AI agents.
GitHub CLI is open source, so you can review the telemetry implementation in the repository.
" It's not a bad idea, at a glance: Companies need visibility into how users are interacting with their software, and which features are worth spending more time on. With that in mind, GitHub adding this feature isn't surprising. What's less acceptable is turning telemetry on by default and not being particularly clear on what telemetry might be harvested by the CLI.
There's a lot of new code to dig through in the CLI repo with plenty of mentions of telemetry, but no solid list of data points that might be included. GitHub did not spell everything out on the telemetry page, noting instead that users can inspect what would be sent by enabling logging.
"If you want to see exactly what would be sent without actually sending it, you can enable logging," the help page reads before providing a sample of what might be in there. The sample payload includes an agent field, architecture, device ID, OS, flags, command name, invocation ID, and other metadata. Actual telemetry payloads, GitHub noted, may differ considerably.
GitHub previews Agentic Workflows as part of continuous AI concept GitHub said that telemetry data collected from CLI clients is sent to its internal analytics infrastructure, but that may still not be enough to satisfy the concerns of those who are now handing over more data to Microsoft and GitHub without much notice. Luckily, GitHub included opt-out instructions on the new Telemetry page.
Opting out can be done either through an environment variable or a configuration option in the CLI itself. For the environment variables, GitHub said exportingWhy flexibility will define the future of functionality Enterprise infrastructure choices shouldn't have to be hostages to compromise. Cisco FlashStack with Nutanix sets out to break the deadlock2
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