Copilot Memory: no per-repo scoping for user-level preferences — causes cross-project contamination (incl. PII leakage)

[ByteBenderJ]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot in GitHub

Body

Related #193945 discusses persistent user-specific memory more generally; this post focuses specifically on the lack of per-repo scoping and the resulting cross-project contamination

Summary
Copilot Memory's user-level preferences apply to every repository unconditionally, with no way to scope or exclude specific repos. Working across many unrelated codebases (client-specific, personal, code and non-code) causes real cross-project contamination.

What happened
• A Terraform tooling convention learned in one client codebase surfaced as "relevant context" in an unrelated personal repo (an Obsidian notes vault).
• Separately, an internal support-ticket contact-routing note (names/roles tied to a specific incident ticket, all internal info) was also carried into that unrelated repo. Today that's mostly an inconvenience/noise issue; but it highlights the bigger concern below.

Why this matters
User-level memory is designed to "follow you everywhere," but real-world usage spans many disconnected projects and clients. Beyond incorrect assumptions from stale/irrelevant context, aggregating this kind of internal detail into one persistent cross-repo store means that if the memory store were ever compromised, it would expose a much wider blast radius of internal information than any single repo would on its own.

Requests

1. Allow users to opt a specific repo out of their own user-level memory (today only repo admins can turn off repo-level facts — there's no equivalent control for personal preferences).
2. Add guardrails at capture time against storing incident/ticket-specific or named-contact details as memory, regardless of scope, since these rarely generalize usefully across repos anyway.
3. Improve reliability of reviewing/deleting individual memory entries; downvote/delete actions failed consistently when attempting cleanup.

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