Multiple licenses, multiple accounts?

[CryZe]

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My account is eligible to access a Copilot Individual license for free. The organization I work for is in the process of activating a Copilot Business license for my account. According to the information I found, this means that I lose access to my individual license. However, I would want to continue using my license for the open source projects I work on, and as per company policy, I almost certainly am not allowed to use the business license for that. Is there any solution intended by GitHub for this? Do I maybe have to create a second GitHub account?

[kelchm]

Agreed -- this really is a significant issue IMO.

I was recently invited to join an organization and to my surprise found that my existing subscription was replaced without warning.

In addition to the concerns that @CryZe shared about no longer being able to use a personal Copilot license for my own personal projects, this also creates an issue where if you happen to be a member of multiple organizations that each provide a Copilot license, you could end up inadvertently leaking "User Engagement Data" for interactions related to work for one organization to another.

"User Engagement Data" is defined by GitHub as:

This includes pseudonymous identifiers captured on user interactions with Copilot, such as accepted or dismissed completions, error messages, system logs, and product usage metrics.
https://resources.github.com/copilot-trust-center/#privacy

Unfortunately it looks like the only path to resolving this for now is indeed to create entirely separate GitHub accounts for personal use and each organization.

[dperuo]

Seems like there's two issues here:

1. "User Engagement Data" passed from one corporation to another; and
2. The potential for Copyright and Intellectual Property claims because of inadvertent use of a Enterprise Copilot license in a repo not owned by that corporation.

We need clarity on how GitHub protects privacy and copyright when a GitHub user account has access to repos across multiple unrelated organizations.

CC: @CryZe | @kelchm

[kelchm]

To add some additional detail, since I do not see this same language used anywhere in the Copilot docs / trust center -- here is an excerpt from the email I received from GitHub immediately after joining an organization which provided a Copilot license:

The organization granting you this GitHub Copilot license will receive user engagement data for all activities associated with this account. For more information, please review GitHub's Privacy Statement.

Combining this with the linked definition of "User Engagement Data" seems to indicate that using Copilot on the same GitHub account across multiple organizations could result in leaking data from one organization to another.

[ayim]

@CryZe is your organization granting GitHub Copilot access to your personal account, or to an enterprise managed account?

[ayanas-git]

👀 - This is an issue. Especially given our current tech-work culture, managing multiple data-oriented projects and their environmental requirements needs some sort of parallel solution, at minimum.

[vimkin]

@CryZe considering the same matter discussed here https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/56234, it seems reasonable to create separate accounts per enterprise/organization provisioning Github Copilot Business. Otherwise the policies of different enterprises might clash (e.g. Org A allows Copilot Chat, whereas Org B not, as a result the chat is disabled everywhere).