Cookie banners are one of the most annoying parts of browsing the Internet, requiring you to click accept or decline on multiple sites. GitHub, owned by Microsoft, is starting to address this aggravation by removing cookie banners from its site this week. “At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite annoying, so we decided to look for a solution,” explains GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. “After a short search, we found one: just don’t use non-essential cookies. Actually quite simple. “
GitHub, which operates independently from Microsoft, has now removed all non-essential cookies, meaning the site does not send information to third-party analytics services. This is a change that turns into a commitment, so GitHub will only use cookies that are required and not cookies to track, serve, or send information elsewhere.
The EU’s cookie consent policy, introduced in 2018 as part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is central to sites implementing cookie banners. It’s a policy that has been implemented in many different ways on different sites, with some particularly bad results on mobile versions of sites.
The EU has tried to fix its hopeless cookie consent policy this year, but more drastic changes will be needed to prevent these prompts from appearing on the web. GitHub is a great example for a web service to set up, and when combined with browser vendors phasing out third-party cookies, we should end up seeing fewer annoying cookie walls and banners. Realistically, we’ll still be living with these annoying prompts for years to come.
Update, Dec. 17 1:40 PM ET: Article updated to clarify that GitHub is independent from Microsoft.