[endeavor]

I certainly understanding wanting to have control over what you want private. But stars and forks are the main things I use to evaluate a project I'm unfamiliar with. If a project has 1000 stars and 100 forks I know it's pretty solid. If those metrics were disabled by default Github loses a lot of value, since the majority of users would stick with the defaults.

[ocharles]

The counter doesn't have to be private, but being able to view exactly what one person has starred should have a privacy control. We do this at MusicBrainz with 'subscriptions' (to be notified when something changes). We give a number of subscribers, and those with public subscriptions are explicitly listed: http://musicbrainz.org/artist/10adbe5e-a2c0-4bf3-8249-2b4cbf...