So if someone creates a piece of art and I take a photo of it and sell the photo, or create prints of it, or even just give it give that photo to lots of people, what is that?

You don’t need to remember to delete it, you can revoke the access from your github account.

Then it’s useless.

That’s how a lot of tools work. Your maven password is in .m2/settings.xml

Your ssh private key is in .ssh/id_rsa

The only person with access to these files should be you. If anyone else does then your machine is compromised