I welcome this. I don't want anyone to prejudge or train a profile on me based on my starring history. Because my history of starring goes back chronologically and for many years, it's a wider signal than one might realize.

I note that Github's only opt out for a public star list is to 'Make profile private and hide activity', with the description:

"Enabling this will hide your contributions and activity from your GitHub profile and from social features like followers, stars, feeds, leaderboards and releases"

That's a vague set of repercussions. Cleverly worded to discourage.

Feature request: A way of export your star list into a handy json format before you nuke it. I'd like to have this for my own historical record, without having to share it with the public or Microsoft.