Fast Google Fonts with Cloudflare Workers • Hacker News Board

Re: Fast Google Fonts with Cloudflare Workers

#21

Post by skybrian » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

krageon wrote: post #17

skybrian wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this allowed under Google's privacy policy? How about the GDPR? I mean, it's one thing to talk about what Google's technically capable of, and quite another for it to be legal.

It's not allowed under the GDPR. But let us get real; this is Google doing it, and anyone complaining about this practice would first need to prove that it happens (which is not easy). You can (and should) expect large American companies to always ignore as many laws as they can get away with.

That's a caricature. In my experience, Google has lots of lawyers that are quite serious about making sure what they do is at least arguably legal, and company procedures to make sure that employees follow the rules. Not that it always works.

Re: Fast Google Fonts with Cloudflare Workers

#22

Post by Sylos » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

_8j50 wrote: post #19

Sylos wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To elaborate on how Google can track your users: The user's browser downloads the font off of Google's server, which gives Google their IP address, and the browser also tells Google's server what webpage it's currently visiting, via the HTTP referer. And given that almost every webpage ships something from Google, Google has an almost complete browsing history for every public IP. There's generally multiple devices b…

You're forgetting user agent strings as well. On mobile,They tell google the exact device make and model and in case of in-app browsers the specific app and version.

Right, how did I forget about those? That even is exactly the type of data that will allow identifying specific devices underneath one public IP.

Re: Fast Google Fonts with Cloudflare Workers

#23

Post by partiallypro » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 10:25 PM UTC

capevace wrote: post #15

dillondoyle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I wonder what speed tradeoff there will be for commonly cached/repeated fonts like Roboto, like maybe only makes since to inline less common fonts

AFAIK Google Fonts doesn’t allow browsers to cache the fonts for tracking purposes...

They do browser caching, but it's not as long as many would like for a static resource like a font. There is no proof they use Google Fonts for tracking, though, it's entirely possible they'll use it for that in the future...but I don't see a reason for them to do so. Google Analytics is already on most websites.

Re: Fast Google Fonts with Cloudflare Workers

#24

Post by _8j50 » Sat, Nov 24, 2018, 3:47 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #21

krageon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not allowed under the GDPR. But let us get real; this is Google doing it, and anyone complaining about this practice would first need to prove that it happens (which is not easy). You can (and should) expect large American companies to always ignore as many laws as they can get away with.

That's a caricature. In my experience, Google has lots of lawyers that are quite serious about making sure what they do is at least arguably legal, and company procedures to make sure that employees follow the rules. Not that it always works.

Arguably legal thanks to FISA court orders that benefit Google and usgov? Where blame can be placed on "coercion" by US intel community?