Comment by lostmyoldone

Re GitHub keeping unreachable data, if I understand it right, isn't that GitHub painting a giant target on their back? Wouldn't that that imply every secret accidentally committed and then 'deleted' is still accessible, when one would expect it not to be? It's one thing to have your source code in the wild, but pairing it up with thought-to-be-deleted secrets would be an absolute disaster.

Certainly one should not ever keep using a secret once it has escaped into a Git repo, but I'm sure it happens quite frequently.