No cookie for you

August 2, 2022 update: We’ve since updated our privacy statement with regards to web cookies for marketing to enterprise users. View the changelog here.

Good news: we removed all cookie banners from GitHub! 🎉

No one likes cookie banners. But cookie banners are everywhere. So how did we pull this off?

Well, EU law requires you to use cookie banners if your website contains cookies that are not required for it to work. Common examples of such cookies are those used by third-party analytics, tracking, and advertising services. These services collect information about people’s behavior across the web, store it in their databases, and can use it to serve personalized ads.

At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite 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. 🤔

So, we have removed all non-essential cookies from GitHub, and visiting our website does not send any information to third-party analytics services. (And of course GitHub still does not use any cookies to display ads, or track you across other sites.)

We are also committing that going forward, we will only use cookies that are required for us to serve GitHub.com. GitHub has had a long history of prioritizing developer privacy, often going above and beyond any legal requirement, including extending EU privacy protections to all users regardless of location. Developers should not have to sacrifice their privacy to collaborate on GitHub.

That’s all. Have a nice day!

Written by

Nat Friedman

@nat