Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

fonts.bunny.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 346 posts

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#41

Post by tyingq »

hannob wrote: post #31

I find it really strange where some privacy debates have gone wrong, and this is a perfect example. It's basically a form of "don't trust them, better trust us, also we're in a country with better privacy laws". Which is an imperfect solution at best, and given that I have no idea who bunny.net is it's a questionable one at best. If you embed a font hosted somewhere else you expose some of your user data to them. Now…

It seems okay to me for the case of google. Since Google-owned sites, Adsense, Gmail, and Google Analytics are so ubiquitous, things like a font download are trivially easy for Google to correlate to your other activity. There's much less value for BunnyCDN to abuse it, because they don't have the critical mass of your other activity.

Yes, just serving up your own fonts is better, but this is an improvement that seems to work with only a minor change.

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#42

Post by ntoskrnl »

jobigoud wrote: post #14
politelemon wrote: post #4

On the font pages, they use this as the example sentence: > The quick brown bunny jumps over the lazy dog. While the site is trying to be quirky and cute, replacing 'fox' with 'bunny' doesn't showcase what 'f' and 'x' look like.

Shortest I could find in a few minutes: The quick brown fox jumps over the glazed bunny.

If a fox encountered a glazed bunny in the wild, it probably wouldn't jump over it...

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#43

Post by ntoskrnl »

hannob wrote: post #31

I find it really strange where some privacy debates have gone wrong, and this is a perfect example. It's basically a form of "don't trust them, better trust us, also we're in a country with better privacy laws". Which is an imperfect solution at best, and given that I have no idea who bunny.net is it's a questionable one at best. If you embed a font hosted somewhere else you expose some of your user data to them. Now…

If you're requesting data over a network, ultimately you have to trust someone. Fwiw bunny.net is pretty well respected. I view them as one level "below" the mega-enterprise CDNs like Cloudfront/Akamai, the same way Digital Ocean is one level "below" AWS/GCP/Azure

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#45

Post by 0daystock »

einpoklum wrote: post #27
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #16

Years ago I did sudo bash -c 'echo ":: fonts.googleapis.com" >> /etc/hosts' sudo bash -c 'echo "0.0.0.0 fonts.googleapis.com" >> /etc/hosts' and I haven't looked back.

I am often tempted to push this further to: sudo bash -c 'echo ":: google.com" >> /etc/hosts' sudo bash -c 'echo "0.0.0.0 google.com" >> /etc/hosts'

What exactly do you believe doing this will accomplish, other than cutting off access from a search engine?

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#46

Post by hsjdbdksjsj »

hannob wrote: post #31

I find it really strange where some privacy debates have gone wrong, and this is a perfect example. It's basically a form of "don't trust them, better trust us, also we're in a country with better privacy laws". Which is an imperfect solution at best, and given that I have no idea who bunny.net is it's a questionable one at best. If you embed a font hosted somewhere else you expose some of your user data to them. Now…

you won't believe this, but as the end user you can solve this in your life once and for all, and also improve your life! something rare for online annoyances nowadays.

any decent browser, i mostly use firefox, have a checkbox in the font screen that prevents sites from changing the page font.

i set all sites to user Ubuntu Mono. always. all the time. everywhere.

the only downside are sites that use winding-like fontawesome. you will get "S" instead of the magnifyingglass icon... i got used to things like that. Google meet screen is particularly weird. meh.

but after you are past the initial shock, having the same font everywhere is the ideal usability hack. faster reading. less distraction. it's perfect.

and as a bonus i don't even care (as i block referrer headers xdomain), not a single request ever goes to googlefont and the likes.

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#47

Post by wewxjfq »

jefftk wrote: post #30
thematrixturtle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#:~:text=/google/font... .

The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to only what is needed to serve fonts efficiently. Use of Google Fonts API is unauthenticated. The Google Fonts API does not set or log cookies. In other words, data from font serving does not feed into advertising personalization. (Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google)

Does Chrome send the unique identifier with Google Fonts API requests? If so, they don't need cookies.

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#48

Post by weird-eye-issue »

markx2 wrote: post #44

Firefox > Settings > General > Fonts > Advanced Uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" No remote fonts anywhere.

Breaks lots of icons and such right? I disabled fonts for like a day with Ublock Origin but it was too inconvenient

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#49

Post by markx2 »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #48
markx2 wrote: post #44

Firefox > Settings > General > Fonts > Advanced Uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" No remote fonts anywhere.

Breaks lots of icons and such right? I disabled fonts for like a day with Ublock Origin but it was too inconvenient

I have not noticed any breakage though it may well happen.

But pages are fast to load, I get a consistent chosen font across all sites and my privacy (at least for font loading) is respected.

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#50

Post by favourable »

This is a great project, but I learned to use a system font stack[0] instead to address latency issues on my sites. I run an e-commerce site and every millisecond in rendering time is potentially a lost sale. It needs to be fast, especially for those on 3G (or 2G?) connections.

[0] https://systemfontstack.com/

Post reply on HN