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Google Fonts Analytics

fonts.google.com

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Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#151

Post by smichel17 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #107
ThePhysicist wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google might have better ways to track people. Fonts are also cached by CDNs and the local browser so I’m not sure if they provide good tracking data (they get loaded only for the first page visit for example and popular fonts like Open Sans are probably already in your cache when you open a page). If you’re concerned about tracking as a website operator you can simply load the fonts from your own server, mos…

You can even install the fonts locally to your machine and your browser will favor the local copy. There are some tools like Skyfonts that let you install the top X from Google Fonts and it can be a fun way to speed up a lot of the web; with the tradeoff that not a lot of people have the top X installed for useful large versions of X and that becomes its own fingerprint for surveillance software (testing how long tex…

Also there's a addon called "decentraleyes" that will cache fonts, amongst other things. It's one of 3 extensions I install in every browser I'm allowed to. The others are uBlock origin and https everywhere. All 3 have good privacy/security/performance benefits with effectively no breakage, in their default configurations.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#154

Post by earthboundkid »

skosch wrote: post #35
rememberlenny wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not, and they don't sell the data or use it for any tracking.

Their FAQ says that they don't (currently) use cookies, but it also includes the sentence "Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure", so they could still do some IP-based analytics. More importantly though, it gives Google accurate insight into web traffic (many users block Google Analytics, but almost everyone loads web fonts), and it allows them to craw…

I assume that Google uses Analytics and Fonts as part of its algorithm for determining if a site is popular when creating search engine results. Am I wrong? Does anyone know on or off the record?

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#155

Post by nixpulvis »

raphlinus wrote: post #145
bytematic wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust based font tools? Do you mean local font manipulation type scripts or some sort of web service?

Mostly local font manipulation tools, including a GUI editor, but I can imagine some of the work ultimately becoming useful inside web services.

Not font manipulation, but the Alacritty project has had an RFC [1] open for a while now to try and make font configuration better. It turns out I barely understand fontconfig every time I need to touch it. I'm just curious what (if any) your opinions about the de-facto Linux fontconfig framework are?

[1]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/957

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#156

Post by commoner »

smichel17 wrote: post #151
WorldMaker wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can even install the fonts locally to your machine and your browser will favor the local copy. There are some tools like Skyfonts that let you install the top X from Google Fonts and it can be a fun way to speed up a lot of the web; with the tradeoff that not a lot of people have the top X installed for useful large versions of X and that becomes its own fingerprint for surveillance software (testing how long tex…

Also there's a addon called "decentraleyes" that will cache fonts, amongst other things. It's one of 3 extensions I install in every browser I'm allowed to. The others are uBlock origin and https everywhere. All 3 have good privacy/security/performance benefits with effectively no breakage, in their default configurations.

Decentraleyes is an excellent add-on that improves browsing speed and privacy with no negative side effects. Currently, the only font cached by Decentraleyes is Noto Sans. It also caches Google's Web Font Loader script and many major JavaScript frameworks.

https://decentraleyes.org

https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes

Web developers who are concerned about privacy exposure from Google Fonts can use google-webfonts-helper to extract the font files and self-host them.

https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts

https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#159

Post by jacobolus »

raphlinus wrote: post #115
amelius wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, have your spiral based tools been documented/published somewhere?

Best place is probably my thesis: https://levien.com/phd/phd.html . All of the code is available under permissive open source license. I've been continuing to poke around with this and hope to have a newer set of tools before long.

Let me recommend that anyone interested in fonts, 2d graphics, CAD, etc. read Raph’s thesis. It’s great!

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#160

Post by nl »

raphlinus wrote: post #108
skrebbel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google has poured a lot of money into this Why, though? Not charity, I'd assume. The only other answers I can come up with are pretty damn nefarious.

I can speak to this a little, in terms of pitches we made to management to get resources for our little project. None of this is authoritative. 1. A lot of text was rendered into PNGs, and that made the web less searchable, as well as less accessible, slower to load, and less mobile-friendly. All 4 of these factors do have economic impact at Google scale. 2. Fonts were one of the few features that Flash had that HTML…

Are you the Raph who built Advogato?

I loved that site.

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