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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

> Pages sites using a custom domain will not be impacted.

Not sure what % of Github Pages use custom domains but this appears to leave no mechanism for custom domains to optionally enable this header either.

I don't really understand the motivation here; if it was for the benefit of GH users, why wouldn't that apply to custom domain users? Is it purely to hamper Google (as Microsoft's competitor)?

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There could be a technical reason for it not to be available for custom domains (yet?).

The page mentions that the header is set for all pages served by github.io, which leads me to believe they add the header on the reverse-proxy/loadbalancer side for github.io pages.

Custom domains most likely use separate proxy/loadbalancing infrastructure where the same change could take longer to implement, or they might be exploring options to make it configurable.

github.com is itself a social network and a tracker. They should know a lot more about the status and activities of the software projects hosted there and the users than the users themselves do. Enabling third parties to track users across their site would be the equivalent of opening the lid of this treasure chest.

Oh no, I do understand that. It's just the excluding custom domains part I don't get. Why not keep Google out of all their data: why give them a portion?

I've never thought of GitHub like that, but it makes so much sense. With all of the features (like the commit heat-map), GitHub is at this point 2 parts social network, and 2 parts social network for software.

Same, I'd like a way to disable this on my GHPages site as well.

I agree with the other comments that Github doesn't allow users to control headers on Github Pages sites.

But my first guess was that this was a Msoft vs Google thing and not a privacy thing.

Maybe there was more of a privacy concern they wanted to address by removing it from the github.io subdomains.

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