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Cookie banners are one of the most annoying parts of browsing the web, forcing you to click accept or decline on multiple sites. Microsoft-owned GitHub 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 irritating, so we decided to look for a solution,” said Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub. “After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.
GitHub, which operates independently from Microsoft, has now removed all non-essential cookies, which means the site does not send any information to third-party analytics services. This is a change that turned into an engagement, so GitHub will only use cookies that are necessary and none to track, display ads, or send information elsewhere.
The EU’s cookie consent policy, introduced in 2018 as part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), has been at the heart of sites implementing cookie banners. This is a policy that has been implemented in many different ways across the sites, with particularly poor results on the mobile versions of the sites.
The EU tried to correct its appalling cookie consent policy this year, but it will take more drastic changes to reverse how often these prompts are displayed on the web. GitHub is a good example of a web service to be defined, and combined with browser vendors phasing out third-party cookies, we could potentially see less annoying cookie walls and banners. In reality, we will still be living with these boring prompts for years to come.
Update, December 17 1:40 p.m. ET: Article updated to clarify that GitHub operates independently of Microsoft.
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