On one hand, it sounds like it's only on marketing pages, which I never visit anyways.<p>On the other hand, in December 2020, they said "We are also committing that going forward, we will only use cookies that are required for us to serve GitHub.com" and apparently in corporate terms, a "commitment" lasts less than two years now.<p>Presumably the main change here is Nat made this commitment and Nat has since left Microsoft, but it's hard to believe their marketing team thinks the data value from a couple marketing pages is worth the PR hit from this. Just a dumb--- business move, really.
Sounds like they are adding cookies to their marketing landing pages for enterprise ads. Not that they are running ads on GitHub.<p>Is there something more to this?
They changed the section about DNT, which makes it confusing. If GitHub can use DNT, then they should mention that (like it had before). If GitHub does not use DNT, then they should delete that section.<p>The same section mentions Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin, which they could mention anyways if they want to do, but they should mention that GitHub is not affiliated with them (even though some of these projects might be hosted on GitHub).
developers are typically unreachable to marketers. This will be MSFT unlocking a rare audience that will fetch top dollars from enterprise advertisers, right before cookies go out of standard.<p>This move, like the exclusive Netflix ads inventory, makes it clear that MSFT sees ads as a big driver to business growth.
The user tracking makes sense, but ads are weird in this product. There's no way it makes sense to add ads to paying customers. That's strange.
This is Microsoft we’re talking about here. They provide OSes and PowerPoint for the CIA laptops that plan extrajudicial assassinations and torture sites, and groupware for the concentration camps for children down in Texas; their blatant commercialism is perhaps the least gross thing about them.<p>Imagine the most terrible dark patterns from LinkedIn (which they also own), and go self-host Gitea and move your repos.