New Delhi, Dec 18 (IANS): Open source repository GitHub, owned by Microsoft but operates independently, has removed all non-essential cookies from its platform and visiting the website will not send any information to third-party analytics services.

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman said that GitHub already does not use any cookies to display ads, or track you across other sites.

"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," he said in a statement late on Thursday.

The 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 behaviour across the web, store it in their databases, and can use it to serve personalised ads," Friedman said.

The EU's cookie consent policy was introduced in 2018 as part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

"We are also committing that going forward, we will only use cookies that are required for us to serve GitHub.com," the company CEO said, adding that developers should not have to sacrifice their privacy to collaborate on GitHub.

Microsoft-owned GitHub saw a 46.3 per cent growth in developer productivity in India, along with a massive 103.1 per cent growth in total active students in the country, the open source code repository platform said earlier this month.

More than 56 million developers are now building on GitHub globally. This includes more than 1.9 billion contributions added and more than 60 million new repositories created, according to GitHub's annual State of the Octoverse Report.