Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
When you use Google fonts, they track every request you send them, building profiles on your customers/users and selling that data. They are also able to know your complete visitor stats including location, interests, computer info, time in the site, and damn near anything else.
If you care about that, source your own font from your servers.
How? You make an unauthenticated request to the cdn to get the font data. So they get IP and user agent, but no site cookies or other scripts are loaded. I’m not trying to defend them; fuck Google, but it is definitely not like other analytics services from Google. So, computer info (beyond user agent), time on site, interests, etc. is speculative at most.
To clarify, when I say “speculative”, I mean they are speculating your identity, not that your assessment is speculative. They can make a pretty good estimate of who you are even behind nat and use that with graph resolution to maybe surmise those details about you, but it isn’t deterministic like the analytics api. And they “promise” they aren’t doing that with the fonts api, but obviously they aren’t to be trusted.
Agreed. When using a hosted font, the browser sends a full GET request. That includes all headers that service has access to. IP address, browser agent, referrer, origin, etc. Some of this depends on the site's CORS (which are often incorrectly configured) and other settings, along with browser cache; but in general it's just another GET.
By using the hosted font, Google is absolutely getting tracking information. Yes, they say it's not tied to an account, though it's easily done since they have the IP and browser / device info. True, it's not as intensive as an analytics api, but it's still tracking. I have no doubt that they map the font usage to account metadata in order to build and sell usage profiles. It is speculative, in the same way the person standing over a body, holding a bloody knife is speculative of the killer. It's close enough for their purposes. Also, many ad blockers block analytics urls, fonts are a different matter (though you can enable font blocking in some.)
For stronger security, and to prevent data leakage, when building a web application, host your own fonts. When using the web, block third party fonts. Or if you care to go all-out, setup a forced redirect to locally hosted fallbacks instead of going out to the open web to get a font.
Google isn't freely hosting fonts as a kindness.
Browser fingerprinting is surprisingly accurate. Any other you site you visit which uses google analytics (which is like all of them) with the same fingerprint is then linked up, so voila the user is no longer anonymous. The categories that your site may be catering to are therefore added to the profile. Each page request on this site loads the font file again, adding to the perceived time on the site (that is, take last request time - first request time, now you have a pretty good estimate). The point is that while it's not invasive and exact as running google's js on your site, it does add to their user profile which Google sells to brokers and all that crap. My point being that they can gather a lot more info than one would think when only Google Fonts is used on a site.
These days, you also likely get faster loading times when you self-host the font, because it can be sent through the same HTTPS connection and because caching doesn't work anymore like it used to many years ago (cached files aren't shared anymore between websites).