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

Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

fontfeed.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 79 posts

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#11

Post by Nux »

kbar13 wrote: post #8
Nux wrote: 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.

Kbar, why do you need "highly available" fonts when you can bundle them in your web site? If the web site is up, fonts will work, if not fonts won't be needed anyway.

Regarding caching, anyone knows how browsers cache content? I.e. if I host my own fonts and someone visits me, then visits another web site with same fonts.. are they retrieved from the cache or downloaded yet again? I'm guessing they are downloaded again which is unfortunate..

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#12

Post by dewitt »

I'm not speaking in any official capacity, but to at least get the conversation started off with data, here's Google's public FAQ regarding the Fonts API privacy policy:

  https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Privacy
What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users?

The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts efficiently.

Use of Google Fonts is unauthenticated. No cookies are sent by website visitors to the Fonts API. Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com, googleusercontent.com, or gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail.

In order to serve fonts as quickly and efficiently as possible with the fewest requests, we cache all requests made to our servers so that your browser only contacts us when it needs to.

Requests for CSS assets are cached for 1 day. This allows us to update a stylesheet to point to a new version of a font file when it’s updated. This ensures that all visitors to websites using fonts hosted by the Google Fonts API will see the latest fonts within 24 hours of their release.

The font files themselves are cached for one year, which is long enough that the entire web gets substantially faster: When millions of websites all link to the same fonts, they are cached after visiting the first website and appear instantly on all other subsequently visited sites. We do sometimes update font files to reduce their file size, increase coverage of languages, and improve the quality of their design. The result is that website visitors send very few requests to Google: we only see 1 CSS request per font family, per day, per browser.

We do log records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is on a need-to-know basis and kept secure. We keep aggregated usage numbers to track how popular font families are, and we publish these aggregates in the Google Fonts Analytics site. From the Google web crawl, we detect which websites are using Google Fonts, and publish this in the Google Fonts BigQuery database. To learn more about the information Google collects and how it is used and secured, see Google's Privacy Policy.

For further technical discussion of how Google Fonts serves billions of fonts a day to make the web faster, see this earlier tech talk from the Google Developers YouTube channel.

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#13

Post by justcommenting »

This seems to be a growing problem, even among so-called 'privacy advocates.' The last time I checked, EFF's Privacy Badger extension was designed around having no qualms about making exactly these types of bad trade-offs on users' behalf.

The cost of your privacy--even in the eyes of the EFF--sometimes is worth little more than reliably serving a font or a copy of jQuery and claiming to respect 'Do Not Track'.

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#14

Post by mp3geek »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #9
mp3geek wrote: post #4

For the end user 3rd party fonts can be blocked via Adblock Plus; https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/filters.html

Or Ghostery, which only blocks trackers, but allows privacy-friendly ads.

"privacy-friendly ads", all ads need to track on some level, so it will only depend on which company you trust more.

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#15

Post by majika »

I use NoScript and Policeman on Firefox, with conservative settings (disallow all active content (scripts, fonts, WebGL), whitelist-only cross-site requests). I've also configured Firefox to block cookies by default; only permitted sites can store cookies for the session, and just a handful I allow permanent cookies.

Web pages load much quicker, Firefox uses less resources, my browsing is significantly more secure (see [1] for risk of loading arbitrary fonts), and I can browse the web without Google/Facebook/AdvertizingCorp (and thus the Five Eyes) building a profile of everything I do. It's a nice feeling.

This set up also blocks ads served from third parties, which I feel is an agreeable compromise on web advertising. If I send a request to your website, and you send me a document with embedded images stored on your website, I'll download them and view them alongside the page. However, if you try to tell me "go send 5 unsecure requests to each of these three companies you've never heard of, and execute their 20KB of code, to get flashing ads alongside this page" - I'll ignore you.

Sites loading resources from external domains (usually Google) is nothing new. I've been browsing this way for two years now, and I've developed a healthy level of contempt for 95% of web developers. The vast majority of them just don't care for their users; campaigning to get the developers to change their habits is a broken model. Ultimately, you have to take control, and decide for yourself what you want to run on your computer.

I don't know why more people don't browse this way; some actually ridicule this approach ("get with the times"). It boggles the mind.

[1]: https://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web-fo...

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#16

Post by justcommenting »

dewitt wrote: post #12

I'm not speaking in any official capacity, but to at least get the conversation started off with data, here's Google's public FAQ regarding the Fonts API privacy policy: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Privacy What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users? The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts effici…

This particular issue has come up in previous HN discussions, but I would draw people's attention to innocuous and quite reasonable-sounding phrases like "need-to-know basis." What does that really mean for a company like Google, whose core business model fundamentally depends on extensively data-mining user information? "Need-to-know" could mean almost anything, or whatever Google wants it to mean. This is a classic Google privacy strategy: controlling the debate by defining the terms.

Despite a reassuring policy, you, as the website visitor, don't get to decide these things and to the extent possible, the fact that this is even happening is abstracted away from most non-technical users.

Another example of Google's brilliance in 'controlling the debate by defining the terms': policies like this cleverly (but wrongly) lead the reader to assume that cookies are the only way Google tracks users or correlates their activities. What about TLS-based tracking mechanisms, for example?

But this is a problem that's bigger than Google. When information accumulates in distinct places, the value of exploiting that information always increases. Eavesdroppers naturally move to those places to exploit that information, sometimes with a legal backing (NSA/GCHQ) and sometimes without one (Aurora attacks, and other NSA/GCHQ activities).

Even if you interpret Google's pronouncements charitably, it would be a mistake to assume that using the Google Fonts API can't or won't harm user privacy. Google is a massive target for essentially all eavesdroppers, and the Aurora attacks (and other breaches with lower profiles) show that the accumulation of information--even under reasonable-sounding terms like Google's--can still end up in the wrong hands, and can be an inherently dangerous thing for user privacy.

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#17

Post by dewitt »

justcommenting wrote: post #16
dewitt wrote: post #12

I'm not speaking in any official capacity, but to at least get the conversation started off with data, here's Google's public FAQ regarding the Fonts API privacy policy: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Privacy What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users? The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts effici…

This particular issue has come up in previous HN discussions, but I would draw people's attention to innocuous and quite reasonable-sounding phrases like "need-to-know basis." What does that really mean for a company like Google, whose core business model fundamentally depends on extensively data-mining user information? "Need-to-know" could mean almost anything, or whatever Google wants it to mean. This is a classic…

This isn't my area of ownership, (and I actually agree with a number of things you said), but as far as I know it is exactly why Google goes out of its way to NOT retain those logs, and to explicitly NOT serve this traffic off of a domain that handles user cookies or other PII (i.e., separate by design from search or gmail, etc).

It seems the original author didn't understand this, so it's worth calling out here clearly.

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#18

Post by pyre »

Nux wrote: post #11
kbar13 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kbar, why do you need "highly available" fonts when you can bundle them in your web site? If the web site is up, fonts will work, if not fonts won't be needed anyway. Regarding caching, anyone knows how browsers cache content? I.e. if I host my own fonts and someone visits me, then visits another web site with same fonts.. are they retrieved from the cache or downloaded yet again? I'm guessing they are downloaded aga…

Safari doesn't deal well with web-loaded fonts. I have seen Safari load corrupted webfonts from cache even when turning on "Don't Use Cache for Anything" in the Developer Tools menu. ... so there's always that.

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#19

Post by AceJohnny2 »

ncza wrote: 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.

You don't know what a CDN is, do you?

Re: Google Webfonts, the Spy Inside?

#20

Post by blfr »

justcommenting wrote: post #16
dewitt wrote: post #12

I'm not speaking in any official capacity, but to at least get the conversation started off with data, here's Google's public FAQ regarding the Fonts API privacy policy: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Privacy What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users? The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts effici…

This particular issue has come up in previous HN discussions, but I would draw people's attention to innocuous and quite reasonable-sounding phrases like "need-to-know basis." What does that really mean for a company like Google, whose core business model fundamentally depends on extensively data-mining user information? "Need-to-know" could mean almost anything, or whatever Google wants it to mean. This is a classic…

Google, whose core business model fundamentally depends on extensive data-mining of user information?

Does it? Try Googling from an incognito window on your neighbour's wifi. Use a live distro if you want to be completely sure. Are the results significantly different? Are ads any worse?

I have tried a couple of tests like that (on other people's devices, etc) and the only noticeable use of that trove of data Google has about me is suggested searches from my search history. Google Now can also pull an article of interest every once in a while the same way.

That doesn't mean they don't have the data and won't cough it up on government's request but there seems to be very little effective mining going on.

Post reply on HN