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Atlassian Enables Default Data Collection to Train AI

177 points - today at 12:23 PM

Source
  • martinald

    today at 1:50 PM

    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    - Bitbucket workers are hopelessly out of date (self hosted).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.

      • rurp

        today at 3:23 PM

        > 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).

        Absolutely insane that this is legal. The only reason to do this is to trick and abuse customers. It would be trivially easy to legislate away if our government cared to.

        Atlassian seems like a typical entrenched big company, albeit an extreme example. They make money by selling to the bosses of their users and being the default name brand for many cases. Once a company gets to a certain size and doesn't directly compete much on quality internal corruption and incompetence can run rampant.

          • colechristensen

            today at 3:31 PM

            It's explicitly not legal in California and some other places.

              • pintxo

                today at 3:37 PM

                Also for business customers? I would expect such regulations to only apply to b2c contexts.

        • mhitza

          today at 2:09 PM

          Featureatis. Just keep pumping out features with no thought. Today, probably also AI-coded .

          Even in mid-sized projects if you keep pushing for only new features you'll get a similar system. At least my experience in 3 or so midsized projects that I've worked on where nothing else mattered than checking of features from a huge backlog.

          • ravenstine

            today at 3:05 PM

            Jira is buggy as hell these days. Lots of desyncing that forces me to refresh the page. I can have a ticket open on a sprint board and the modal spontaneously closes after a while, forcing me to reopen it frequently. The other week there were tickets that simply refused to show up in their respective sprint board no matter what I did; later the epic magically appeared on the board out of nowhere, then finally the individual tickets themselves reappeared.

            Gotta love the value that vibe coding has added to this world.

            • wsatb

              today at 2:24 PM

              The search function in Jira has always been unusable. It’s perhaps the worst part of the entire platform, but nice to see they’re still focused on adding features I will never use.

                • saganus

                  today at 2:30 PM

                  I've always thought I was the only one experiencing this and felt like I was crazy.

                  I guess it's "good" to know that I'm not alone.

                  The amount of times I've searched for a ticket that I know it's there (because I either have it opened in a different tab, or because I just created it), but can't find, it's just way to many.

                    • wsatb

                      today at 3:48 PM

                      The results usually seem completely random to me. It's like the feature never made it out of proof of concept territory. The only advantage of all the email noise Jira sends out is that I can usually search my email for what I'm looking for.

              • ezoe

                today at 2:19 PM

                Umm? Is there single step Atlassian did it right? It's a cancer of software development the suits force us to swallow while real development and useful documents are outside of their service because it's so stressful to use.

            • kevcampb

              today at 12:30 PM

              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).

                • pryanbeng

                  today at 3:50 PM

                  They said the opt out features will be rolled out to the Admin portal in May.

                  I got this info from an email they sent out

                  >To give you control over this change, we're introducing new in‑app settings that allow you to manage in‑app data contribution. Initially, these settings will apply to data in Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management, including data in your Atlassian Platform apps (Rovo, Home, Teams, Projects, Assets, Goals, Analytics, and Administration). We'll notify you when settings become available for additional apps you own, so you can review them in Atlassian Administration. Between today and May 19, 2026, we'll gradually roll out these settings in Atlassian Administration. We'll send you another email on May 19th as a reminder, so you have time to review and make any adjustments before August 17, 2026.

                  • carld

                    today at 3:49 PM

                    Are others able to find the setting to opt out? I'm at Atlassian Administration > Security, and I do not see Data contribution. I've looked at other, multiple setting pages and I do not see it.

                    • m4rtink

                      today at 3:42 PM

                      What about really sensitive stuff like if possibly private tickets that have all kinds of stuff like customer data, embargoed CVE fixes or even sensitive health related data, are they just cobble that all into a model so it can leak out to random people ?

                      • kepano

                        today at 2:50 PM

                        This seems to be the official description of the changes:

                        https://www.atlassian.com/trust/ai/data-contribution/faqs

                        • bradleyankrom

                          today at 1:49 PM

                          Here's another link: https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/18/atlassians_new_data_c...

                            • kevcampb

                              today at 2:02 PM

                              Unfortunately that one has a subheading of "From August 17, the outfit will collect customer metadata by default unless you pay for the top tier"

                              It's not just metadata, it's all "in-app data"

                          • Nathanba

                            today at 2:37 PM

                            they sent out an email with this: https://dam-cdn.atl.orangelogic.com/CDNLink/AT12MW17.pdf

                              • kevcampb

                                today at 2:45 PM

                                "Your available data contribution settings will be available no later than May 19, 2026."

                                So let me guess, they're hoping that we forget about this by then, so that they can scoop up our data? I can't think any other reason for it.

                        • Bnjoroge

                          today at 3:18 PM

                          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.

                          • qsera

                            today at 3:31 PM

                            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...

                            • dreknows

                              today at 2:37 PM

                              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.

                                • tgv

                                  today at 3:13 PM

                                  What makes this extra scummy is this:

                                  “If customers were to right now terminate their contract, the new data contribution settings will not apply to them as these will not be enforced until August 17, 2026,” (from https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/18/atlassians_new_data_c...)

                                  So you can't even take a bit of time to consider your options.

                              • huwsername

                                today at 1:58 PM

                                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.

                                  • m4rtink

                                    today at 3:45 PM

                                    I'm thinking it would be ideal if Broadcom buys Attlassian instead and pulls another VMware. Problem solved - for ever. ;-)

                                    • ezoe

                                      today at 2:21 PM

                                      I doubt data in Atlassian are anywhere close to clean or organic. It was designed by hell to swallow shit to real programmer who does real works outside of Atlassian.

                                        • jerjerjer

                                          today at 2:47 PM

                                          Programmer adjacent data can already be consumed from git repos. Atlassian has PM data.

                                      • today at 3:18 PM

                                    • firesteelrain

                                      today at 3:00 PM

                                      No wonder they wanted to stop supporting the Data Center versions for on prem.

                                      • an0malous

                                        today at 3:24 PM

                                        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.

                                          • rogerthis

                                            today at 3:32 PM

                                            Beautiful on paper. But it does not scale outside a certain type of tech people.

                                        • today at 2:55 PM

                                          • microflash

                                            today at 3:08 PM

                                            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.

                                            • reeseparker63

                                              today at 2:16 PM

                                              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.

                                              • jerhewet

                                                today at 3:00 PM

                                                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.

                                                • willis936

                                                  today at 2:58 PM

                                                  Presumably the government and HIPAA carveouts are for legal obligations. Trade secret theft is illegal so I wonder why they're not considering this.

                                                  • kepano

                                                    today at 2:18 PM

                                                    The official Atlassian FAQ on this change:

                                                    https://www.atlassian.com/trust/ai/data-contribution/faqs

                                                    • rsynnott

                                                      today at 3:29 PM

                                                      Imagine an AI based on jira tickets. _That's_ the torment nexus.

                                                      • pkilgore

                                                        today at 2:58 PM

                                                        Does this apply to Loom?

                                                        • sebakubisz

                                                          today at 2:56 PM

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                                                          • boxingdog

                                                            today at 2:35 PM

                                                            [dead]

                                                            • oliver236

                                                              today at 2:10 PM

                                                              genius move.

                                                              • tqwhite

                                                                today at 2:13 PM

                                                                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.

                                                                  • Bnjoroge

                                                                    today at 3:37 PM

                                                                    some incredible levels of cuckoldry

                                                                    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r

                                                                      today at 2:15 PM

                                                                      Dude, what?

                                                                      • malfist

                                                                        today at 2:14 PM

                                                                        What? Atlassian is not stack overflow.