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This is great! GitHub continues to, somehow, surprise me.

One question I do have, however, is whether or not the new homepage[0] which shows where people are when they open a PR actually reveals their present location. In the few samples I checked it did not seem that the presence of the person indicated matched their bio's location settings. If it is truly unmasking people's location I think it should be opt-in only, since it is private information. An employer or state may have issues with someone opening a PR from a specific country at a specific time, for example.

[0] It may be required to open this in an incognito browser.




I spot-tested a three of them and for each one I tested, it matched the information from the user's GitHub profile.

The users might not know it's being used for marketing on the home page, but it seems to be (again, just spot-tested) information that they provided for their /public/ profile.

Edit: NEVERMIND! Just checked a fourth and code from someone with "United States" in their profile showed as coming from Minneapolis.


The data is available unauthenticated here: https://github.com/webgl-globe/data/data.json

If anyone wants to do any further analytics on it, it's easy enough to pull PRs and lat/lon from that.

It does look like lat/lon might be a fixed value for each city (from spot checking a couple). If it's not, that would be surprising and a pretty egregious leak of user info.


Those locations come entirely from public profile bios, as provided by the user.


Then why do they sometimes not match?


I thought that used the bio. Interesting that it didn't match.




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