Privacy Question

[z0ryn]

Hello! On GitHub Education Application (figure1) it says you need to have your name as a name for your account but on GitHub docs (figure2) it says you don't and I am quite privacy conscious as in secondary school. Thank you!

figure1:

figure2:

[AKSHAY-DTM]

Yeah, this confused me too at first 🙂

They’re not actually contradicting each other — they’re talking about two different things.

In general GitHub usage, your profile name does NOT have to match your real identity. You can absolutely use a nickname. That’s what the docs are referring to.

But for GitHub Education, it’s different. Since they’re verifying that you’re really a student at a specific school, they need your profile “Name” field to match your real name exactly as it appears on your academic document. That’s purely for identity verification.

The good news:

• Your username does NOT need to change.
• Only the “Full Name” field in Settings → Public profile needs to match.
• You can change it back after you’re verified.
• You can also keep your email private.

So basically: GitHub = flexible. GitHub Education verification = real name required (temporarily).

[LDiego-svg]

I was also a little confused because I don't like having my name there, but I looked for some information and in the end Gemini told me that it wasn't necessary to always have my name on my profile, that GitHub Education only verified it when we wanted to renew or when our benefits ran out, and that makes sense, since I don't think they need to be checking all the time to see if we have the same name on our profile as on our documentation. I recently removed my full name and haven't had any problems.