Developers, do not embed Google’s products on your sites & compromise the privacy of your visitors.
#CleanUpTheWeb & strip your site of tracking devices by Google, Facebook, etc. to make the web safer. Yes, that includes Google Fonts loaded from Google’s servers.
Heroes to the idea of open standards with accesible, graceful degradation of features, open web standards.
#scroogle /#Fedspook has made the web a giant hive of Spy malware and cynical spam Bots.... Less is more.
@FuckOffGoogle @aral Google *fonts*? Can someone explain the problem there? There's not even any JavaScript involved...
@quarktheawesome @FuckOffGoogle @aral load time if you're letting Google host the fonts can be painful at times. That's more common with multiple font families.
Better route is to have the fonts local and use something like fontsquirrel.com for your site.
But then there's the whole ethics debate about using Google crap to power your sites UI, analytics, etc...
@mwpdx @FuckOffGoogle @aral I wonder about the speed... Google has the resources to make a pretty crazy CDN, and the popular fonts are almost guaranteed to be cached. Very different compared to my site which bounces between free static site hosts, soon to be selfhosted...
@quarktheawesome @FuckOffGoogle @aral
Google font: they serve the font file to your visitors. It's a file transfert. So, they collect a log entry on their server with their IP/browser/where-they-came-from/etc... and because many dev use Google-font, they have a map of most of your visitors move accross the internet.
You can read my "second fight" on this article I published in 2016 : https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/article390/my-fight-against-cdn-libraries
@davidrevoy @FuckOffGoogle @aral Hrm, fair enough. I read a Google FAQ where they claim browsers cache this stuff frequently enough that they don't get a cohesive map - that caching/speed aspect is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to switch to selfhosting, though I guess with cloudflare it doesn't matter anyway.
Awesome post btw, great read. Love the cat avatar idea!
Indeed.
You can use font-face instead, linking to your own font directory.
https://www.w3.org/TR/css-fonts-3/#font-face-rule
You can even check first if user's system has already those fonts.
\@font-face {
font-family: 'Flying circus';
src:
local('Flying circus'),
local('FlyingCircus-Regular'),
url('FlyingCircus.otf'); }
Worth noticing: font-face.com died because of google fonts.
On my personal machine I just have fonts.googleapis entry in my /etc/hosts redirected to localhost. I'm out :D
@davidrevoy @quarktheawesome @FuckOffGoogle @aral You can also download the font and serve it locally
@davidrevoy @quarktheawesome @FuckOffGoogle @aral This is also relevant wrt GDPR, as even the possible connection to the Google servers counts as sharing data with third parties (i.e. requires consent and all the usual stuff)
@elomatreb @davidrevoy @FuckOffGoogle @aral Huh, hadn't even thought of the GDPR aspect of it. Would you have to specify data-sharing with third parties, or is a simple resource request different? Does the Google privacy policy automatically apply?
@quarktheawesome It shouldn't be different, as an IP address is considered just another form of identifiable information.
Google's Privacy Policy applies if you consent, otherwise you'd have to sign a Processing Agreement Contract (?) with Google I think, which would detail the policy regarding your clients data
@elomatreb "if you consent" - you as in the webmaster or you as in the enduser?
@quarktheawesome The end user, the admin/server operator isn't the one who loses privacy here
@elomatreb Gotcha! Thanks for the info.
@quarktheawesome This is just the perspective of someone who runs a nonprofit forum website, not legal advice, yada yada
@davidrevoy very good write up, thanks! One thing intrigued me: do you write texts in ślōnskŏ gŏdka? :)
@saper Thank you!
This translation was a contribution of Grzegorz Kulik done one or two years ago. But it is not maintained I think.
@FuckOffGoogle @aral I can proudly announce all websites under my management has been Google-free since 2016.
Yes! I have just been researching and pondering CDNs and font stuff, etc, and so many are all Googley and Amazon-y. Thanks for making a tweet expressing my exact concern about all that.
@FuckOffGoogle @grainloom @aral As they say, perfection is achieved not when there's nothing left to add, but rather, when there's nothing left to take away.
Unnecessary complexity needs to go. Devs have become too lazy thanks to the overwhelming explosion of computing resources since the 1980's.
@FuckOffGoogle @aral Also, not having to open a bazillion connections (meaning DNS resolutions, TCP 3-way handshake, and (hopefully) TLS handshake) is really good for the loading time of pages.
It was fairly funny to see that on USA Today, who made a tracker-free version of the site for European users.