You can access data from deleted forks, deleted repositories and even private repositories on GitHub. And it is available forever. This is known by GitHub, and intentionally designed that way.
If my thing was public in the past, and I took it private, the old public code is still public.
That’s… How the Internet works anyway.
Edit: See Eager Eagle’s better explanation below.
TL;DR - be careful who you allow to fork your private repos. And if you need to take a public repo, which has forks, private, consider archiving the repo and doing all the new work in a new repo. Which is arguably the reasonable thing to do anyway.
Still a misleading title. This isn’t a way to break into all or even most of your private repositories.
Misleading title.
If my thing was public in the past, and I took it private, the old public code is still public.That’s… How the Internet works anyway.
Edit: See Eager Eagle’s better explanation below.
TL;DR - be careful who you allow to fork your private repos. And if you need to take a public repo, which has forks, private, consider archiving the repo and doing all the new work in a new repo. Which is arguably the reasonable thing to do anyway.
Still a misleading title. This isn’t a way to break into all or even most of your private repositories.
The title literally spells out the concern, which is that code that is in a private or deleted repository is, in some circumstances, visible publicly.
What title would you propose?
The “Accessing Private Repo Data” section covers a situation where code that has always been private becomes publicly visible.