Gitea Ltd is in controls of the domains and has been in a position to collect the IPs of all Gitea instances that ping back for checking newer versions daily. This information has commercial value: it is a pulse and geolocalisation of the majority of Gitea instance since it is the default.
A pull request changing the default for privacy reasons received comments from the Gitea Ltd shareholders advocating against it.
The potential conflict interest was not mentioned: the discussion was exclusively on the balance between security and privacy.
This is not a manifestation of a conflict of interest. But it is a conflict of interest that was not identified as such.