Atlassian Enables Default Data Collection to Train AI

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”\"

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?

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 ?

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

some incredible levels of cuckoldry

Dude, what?

What? Atlassian is not stack overflow.