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Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

fontfeed.com

1–10 of 79 posts

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#3
Thank you for making me aware of this insanity. I'll make sure to block those on my sites. The thoughtless denial of privacy is so weird, no one seems to mind letting third parties spy on their visitors. Yes, you, Google, jquery, cloudflare, typekit, gravatar, disqus and whatever your names might be.

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#6
On the face of things, concern over this type of 'privacy violation' seems to be reasonable. However, coming from a page that is loading content from Fontfeed, Twitter, Gravatar, Google APIs, Fontshop and lo...Google Analytics, I think it's a bit of a silly argument.

If you want privacy, don't expect the sites you are hitting to take care of that for you. If you expect others to enforce security for you, well then, you have an entirely different problem.

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#7
post #3

Thank you for making me aware of this insanity. I'll make sure to block those on my sites. The thoughtless denial of privacy is so weird, no one seems to mind letting third parties spy on their visitors. Yes, you, Google, jquery, cloudflare, typekit, gravatar, disqus and whatever your names might be.

The only person that really cares about your privacy is you. It's cognitive dissonance to believe otherwise.

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#8
post #5

Aren't these web fonts just files they can include with their code? Why include anything from any 3rd party, it's a security and privacy issue.

using font files from a popular public cdn like google fonts is a good idea as they are generally highly available and are generally already cached on the user's machine from use on other sites.

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#10
Another good reason to install Privoxy - http://www.privoxy.org/

Add the following to the config and you'll still be able to retrieve fonts and other shared stuff from Google's servers, but it'll block any tracking cookies and hide the referring site:

  { +crunch-incoming-cookies \
    +crunch-outgoing-cookies \
    +hide-referer(forge) }
  .googleapis.com
  apis.google.com
Unfortunately, it won't help against SSL sites.
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