GDPR penalty for passing on of IP address to Google by using Google Fonts

This argument was tried in the Fashion ID case. A company had inserted Facebook Like buttons on the web page, and argued that it was not responsible for the ensuing disclosure of personal data (such as IP addresses or possible tracking cookies) to Facebook. See, it was the browser and not the website operator that disclosed the data, and the website operator never had access to the data in the browser in the first place!

The European Court of Justice did not buy this argument. By coding the website in a particular way, the website operator was responsible for causing the user's browser to act in a particular way, so it was the “data controller” for the collection an transmission of personal data by the Facebook Like button, though Facebook is of course jointly responsible for what their code does.

The underlying argument is that someone is a data controller and thus responsible for GDPR compliance when they determine the “purposes and means” of processing, alone or jointly with others. Embedding the code for the button was an exercise of this power to determine purposes and means. In contrast, the website operator is not a data controller for whatever Facebook does with the collected data on its servers, because it cannot control what FB does.

The given case from Munich is a very straightforward extension from the Fashion ID judgement, though the website operator didn't even claim that they weren't responsible. Instead, they argued that they had a “legitimate interest”in loading fonts from Google servers, which the court rejected. While I consider it probable that Google does not use data from Fonts servers for tracking, the judgement correctly points out that Google is well-known for tracking – but this doesn't matter anyway, since already the disclosure of personal data without a legal basis is a problem.

:-D something like zkIP (zero knowledge internet protocol)

I was thinking more along the lines of the "allow location" and "allow notifications" popups. The web site will ask you first, and if you say yes the browser then asks you in its own popup. Or you can tell the browser to always accept, or always allow on a per-site basis.

> The fact is that CDNs and similar third party services play an important role.

They no longer do, since browsers implemented cache isolation.

> if I "host" my fonts in S3 do I have to get consent for sharing IP with Amazon?

No, you're supposed to contractually bind your vendors/service providers as data processors with a contract (“data processing agreement”) per Art 28 GDPR. There's some debate around whether US-based companies are legally able of entering into such an agreement (say hello to the Cloud Act from me), but the general consensus still is that non-US cloud regions might be OK, and that CDNs that let you sign a DPA (like Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, …) are also OK. In contrast, Google Fonts does not seem to be covered by the Google Cloud DPA.

> with every router that goes through tracert?

No, such mere transmission doesn't count as processing, and/or the intermediaries are responsible for their own compliance. In any case the connection should be protected by TLS so that only the client IP address + your domain name is visible to intermediate routers.

> websites will add more crap "opt in" CYA forms

Unfortunately, I agree, though the point of this judgement is that self-hosting some assets is a perfectly cromulent alternative. I think relying on “consent” would be difficult in a case like this, since it is not generally possible to make access to a service conditional on consent to unnecessary processing activities. Using a CDN for assets like files is unnecessary.

> I just wish that websites wouldn't force us outside of the EU to the asinine UX required by the EU

For EU-based websites there is no choice, as the law doesn't care about where the users are.

There's also a bit of irony in here that there has been a lot of work in replacing the cursed cookie consent requirements that gave us most of these annoying consent banners – but the past few months revealed that the US tech giants have been successfully lobbying against the proposed ePrivacy Regulation. So please redirect your ire against Google. Without them this might have been fixed in 2018.

no, because that's where to visitor want to go by explicit free will. Not so a hidden 3rd party.