Atlassian enables default data collection to train AI

A result of their performance-review driven development. Every engineer, product manager and team is focused on one thing only. Get through the reviews. That means building feature after feature, projecting revenue/cost savings that may not materialize.

No one is focused on quality of the feature. It is all about speed. No one stops and thinks that may be users doesn't care about it. Data science teams are focused on cherry-picking data in a way that shows positive impact to show to the leadership that things are working. Engineers and teams are disincentivized to improve existing features, performance issues(unless it impacts revenue/some enterprise customer complains) and sometimes being punished for it. They are also steadily downsizing their support teams to cut costs.

Things are not going to improve. You should move away.

> 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.

I worked there and the answer is the engineering talent isn't great, in addition to being very unfocused, and tons of pointless org churn. Bitbucket pipelines/workers was originally implemented, essentially, by two guys (I know, because I sat 2 rows of desks apart from them!) if that tells you anything. I doubt there was more than one person actively maintaining it for the past decade, if they didn't get laid off recently. That office doesn't even physically exist anymore, and the people are long gone.

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.

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.

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.

You can add to this list: Every single input field they have in Confluence and Jira is misbehaving or broken. Apparently, we can't just have a text input widget that works well. Also apparently, this billion dollar enterprise cannot afford to write or use a proper markdown parser, and apparently we, the user lowlives, cannot be trusted with the full "pwer" of basic markdown laugh.

Jira has vim-like bindings for navigating tickets on boards and years later the feature barely works. It has bugs like pressing the j/k keys changes the URL and random fields but stays on the same ticket or doesn't render the newly navigated-to ticket, etc.

It can't be that hard to just dump/export the entire JIRA in one day and migrate it to something else like linear.app? i was already exporting HTML dumps of the entire JIRA and using it in local tool calls to ground agents as far back as last year instead of wrestling with JIRA API to get it to work. This was before linear became popular.

The migration would take 1-2 engineering man-days I suppose. But its money well spent.

Here mine: you cannot link an existing branch to a jira issue. Maybe this is easier said than done but I can't find their reasoning anywhere

Stack ranking

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.

Confluence is ok and has improved recently.

Jira is garbage (frontend, backend). Tough but true.

Until it starts actually affecting their bottom line, how is it a misstep?

You yourself just admitted that you still use their products often.

Sounds like every other SaaS company that was bought by investment fund to milk it dry till everyone migrates off of it.

Not surprised. Quote „…with significant institutional ownership from Vanguard, BlackRock, and others”.

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.

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 ?

I also do not see 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.

So, is this an automatic opt-in without the ability to opt-out?

"In-app data covers user-generated content: page titles and bodies in Confluence, Jira issue titles, descriptions, comments, custom emoji names, custom status names, and workflow names" ... damn!!

This seems to be the official description of the changes:

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

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

That's insane. Every single one of those things is highly sensitive and confidential information. How could you ever trust them after this? That information is priceless for shorting your company on the stock market.

Not that they'd ever do that of course. Nobody with highly sensitive information about rival companies would ever do that.

Opt-out at the Org level.

To get value out of Rovo, it needs detail. Your over-subscribed Jira power user/admin can't effectively make it happen. No guarantees Atlassian (Rovo itself) can make it happen either, but the patterns are going to develop and evolve closer and closer to the Agents that make the features.

They have a peculiar definition of Metadata, however. It's a proprietary data product derived from user content. It's a bit shit they way they sell it as metadata. It's a derivation. It's a product of Content, so it's Content - privacy safeguards cannot begin to cover the variation.

\"Metadata includes two data types referred to as content attributes and common patterns.

Content attributes are statistical characteristics, numeric fields, and derivatives of your in-app data. Examples of content attributes may include the number of story points assigned to a Jira work item or the complexity of a Confluence page. Common patterns are phrases, keywords, and topics we extract from search queries and results, Rovo Chat (conversations, prompts, and responses), and custom configuration data that are frequently seen across many customers, while omitting rare data that may be unique to your organization. Examples of common patterns may include common words, phrases, or Rovo Chat prompt topics that are frequently used by customers, such as “vacation policy” or “recap team activity.”\"

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

I know at least two companies that won't be able to use Atlassian products anymore if that's the case. They really don't give a shit about privacy and regulatory requirements.

github etc hold source code -> scraped -> so AI may generate any of that.

And the specs become the new source (code).

fast forward..

Atlassian etc hold source specs -> scraped -> so AI may generate any of that.. then any of above..

the new source would be (?what? company missions? get-rich-quick-schemes?)

fast forward..

Hmm, if the stock keeps falling that might really happen.

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.

Maybe this will become The Year of the Self Hosted.

For stuff that I don't particularly care about privacy I've kept on the cloud (e.g. my blog, which is public anyway and as such is probably training bots regardless), but for stuff that I don't want to be used to train their models and/or sell to advertisers I have moved to be self hosted on my own network.

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

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.

Sounds very questionable, like boiler room is trying to do a pump n dump. I would not believe these rumors until we hear reputable sources outside of forum speculation

I think I looked for this months ago, and my interpretation was that no, they were not doing AI training with it.. but with this announcement, I will be moving all my stuff to my own servers.

cloud repos are handy, but, having to constantly worry if some criminal comes "joinks, its my data now", is not worth it.

If it is vague, then that probably is a very clear answer to your question.

Maybe if you put your data in Atlassian the you failed to adequately protect your trade secret? IIRC you need to make a reasonable effort to protect the secret.

Because nobody will prosecute them for violations

They are lowering the threshold for this kind of shit for everyone else. We should kill it with fire, before this spreads even further. But I guess most businesses led by non-technical people will simply not care and give their customer data to the AI sharks at no additional cost.

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

Loom isn't mentioned in the Partner materials I have read. That's about all I can say.

Rumor is they're being bought by Anthropic.

I’m building a self-hosted Confluence alternative called Docmost. It’s open-source and can run fully air-gapped.

GitHub: https://github.com/docmost/docmost

Dude, what?

What? Atlassian is not stack overflow.

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