Microsoft -owned GitHub today announced that it is doing away with all non-essential cookies on its platform. Thanks to this, starting today, GitHub .com and its subdomains will not feature a cookie banner anymore, either. That’s one less cookie banner you’ll have to click away to get your work done.
“No one likes cookie banners,” GitHub CEO Nat Friedman writes in today’s announcement. “But cookie banners are everywhere!”
The reason for that, of course, is because of regulations like GDPR in the U.S. and the EU’s directive to give users the right to refuse the use of cookies that reduce their online privacy. The result, even though these regulations have the users’ best interest in mind, is the constant barrage of cookie banners you experience today.
“At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really,” Friedman writes.
To be fair, for a service like GitHub, it may be a bit easier to do away with cookies than for most sites — and especially content sites (and yes, I’m well aware that you probably had to click away from a cookie popup when you came to TechCrunch, too. Feel free to tell me about the irony of that in the comments). GitHub, after all, has a paid product and an audience that likely uses extensions to block trackers and unnecessary cookies anyway. Because of this, the tracking data it gathered was probably not all that useful anyway. GitHub is one of the first large sites to make this move, though, and may be able to set a bit of a trend.