All of these machines and developers have legitimate access to the secret in question, though. Hence my framing of git as just a file storage format—any other mechanism provides the technical means for any of these machines or developers to publicize it. (And a few other simple mechanisms, like &quot;scp the secret from another machine&quot; or &quot;copy&#x2F;paste it with your terminal&quot;, have an increased risk of doing so by accident. Accidentally making a git repo public is generally unlikely.)