alt Hacker NewsAtlassian enables default data collection to train AI
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I really wish I could find a better source to link to for this. By default, all free and paid customers are being opted-in to their data being used for AI training.
All your Confluence pages, Jira tickets, etc.
https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/d... describes how to disable this, but it also appears that the setting to disable this doesn't exist (it's not visible on any of our instances).
Rumors that Anthropic is in talks to buy Atlassian, presumably for the training data. Data poisoning efforts are underway: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/comments/1sqrq24/atl...
The opt-out-by-default pattern has been gradually normalizing in enterprise SaaS, but what makes this particularly egregious is the combination of two things: the data scope (not just metadata, but all in-app content per kevcampb's link) and the broken opt-out (the disabling setting not rendering on any instance).
One is a policy decision you can argue about. Both together suggest the friction is intentional.
The data residency point is worth flagging separately - a lot of enterprise buyers treat region-pinning as a privacy guarantee for everything in their contract. It was never that. Residency tells you where data is stored at rest, not who can access it for what purpose.
Plenty of other companies enable this by default too, such as Github, Figma, Adobe, Vercel. I think it's fair to assume that if you ahve data stored within any company, they'll by default use it for training.
If the rumours of an Anthropic acquisition are true, this makes a lot of sense. Anthropic are probably looking for a clean, high-signal dataset of metadata around business tasks that they can buy.
Will Atlassian be harvesting code and content from private Bitbucket repositories? The wording in their policies and FAQ's is vague, so I'd like to get a definitive (Yes / No) answer.
The adage was "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." Now enterprises are paying to become the product. That's ridiculous.
I read this as "Stop using this product" toggle every time a company does this without consent. It has done a good amount of mental and financial improvements to me.
Worth noting that Atlassian's data residency options don't exempt you from this—your data can still be used for training even if you've pinned it to a specific region.
No wonder they wanted to stop supporting the Data Center versions for on prem.
Genuine question: how many agent-hours to rebuild Jira from scratch and migrate 100% of the content out? Split the work, pool our agents, ship by August 17. ;-)
The official Atlassian FAQ on this change:
I made this a while back to move us off our on-prem Atlassian to Gitlab [1]. Maybe it'll help someone if they want something similar. Fair warning: I haven't tried this recently, so YMMV.
[1] https://gitlab.com/jeremygonyea/jira-to-gitlab-migration-too...
Presumably the government and HIPAA carveouts are for legal obligations. Trade secret theft is illegal so I wonder why they're not considering this.
Let's talk about The Browser Company being bought by Atlassian. If you haven't dropped Arc or Dia, now seems like the time.
Does anyone know what falls under "other cloud products" mentioned here?
Would that include something like Trello?
Does this include repos content in BitBucket?
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, everybody else with both having-business-customers and also data-collecting businesses: "We swear that we absolutely will not collect/train our stuff on business customer data."
Atlassian: "Yolo!"
Who wouldn't these days. Just assume if a company has your data it's training AI on it. No company cares about your privacy more than they do their profits. Not a one.
I am wondering why not just rsyncrypt the source code before pushing to the repo?
>rsyncrypto is a utility that encrypts a file (or a directory structure) in a way that ensures that local changes to the plain text file will result in local changes to the cipher text file. This, in turn, ensures that doing rsync to synchronize the encrypted files to another machine will have only a small impact on rsync's wire efficiency.
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man1/rsyncrypto.1...
To anyone using a model trained on my company's Jira tickets, I apologize for the regression.
Just a couple days ago my CTO was saying he was reluctant to clone all our git repos into github because of the AI training possibility. All our code is in bitbucket now, so not sure what our plan now is.
You can thank GitHub for setting this draconian precedent
They're so desperate because their stock went down ~10 times in last 5 years or so
Bye bye Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, etc. Seriously, if you're using any Atlassian product other than Statuspage, you deserve to get your data hoovered up for AI.
We need to kill SaaS. Apps should be local-first and have peer-to-peer data sync. These companies won't stop until they use your data to replace you and enrich their owners.
AI contributing to rising natural stupidity.
Imagine an AI based on jira tickets. _That's_ the torment nexus.
This is such an obvious conflict of interest. They know Confluence is full of proprietary information. They are violating their client's trust https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/18/atlassians_new_data_c...
Oh another piece of the abysmal tools stack that should bite the dust. Maybe I will still see a software job without terrible tooling in the EU.
I'm really tired of JIRA, to the point where I have expressed it publicly: https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/1772.php
Omg
No surprise here. It's by design.
The only silver lining I can see in this is that if they replace their existing tooling with AI integration, we might actually get search and confluence that works.
I've lost count of how many times I search for a keyword and get no relevant results, but the document I'm looking for, which contains the keyword, is in my automatic pop-up of recent documents visited.
Yet another opportunity to provide an alternative that keeps data private
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genius move.
I don't see it as a misstep at all. The purpose of StackOVerflow is to share expertise.
I am 100% supportive of it being used for training... AI, you, everyone.
Atlassian just goes from misstep to misstep. I still use their products quite often. The amount of P0 bugs I experience is absolutely crazy:
- Bitbucket workers are hopelessly out of date (self hosted). We've had to put so many random workarounds in especially for Docker, as they don't keep them up to date enough
- I have had a bug in JIRA for years where I can't reorder a new ticket unless I refresh the page
- Every new feature they introduce into JIRA/Bitbucket over the past couple of years just doesn't work.
- I tried their AI stuff on the free trial, didn't work at all, tried to cancel, can't cancel the free trial online and had to write a load of support tickets (of which the support ticket contact form bugged out multiple times).
Anyone have any insight into why things have got so so dysfunctional? Tech debt? Talent leaving? Both? Even 'bad' enterprise software tends to be able to keep the most basic features running, but Atlassian is a whole new category. If you check their 'community' it is just hundreds/thousands of bugs with workarounds.