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 (CLI) 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 a telemetry page, release notes mentioning pseudonymous telemetry, and a burst of updates to the CLI repo over 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.

Oh, and AI. 

"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 ...