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Google fonts are used by all websites. And from Referrer header, Google has your browsing history.
by auslander 8y ago
Google fonts are used by all websites. And from Referrer header, Google has your browsing history.
- fixermark 8y agoGoogle also hosts a plethora of standard JS libraries. I wonder how many web pages fail to work with their JS at all if you block Google?
- extra88 8y agoGoogle font logs are not dumped into their analytics and they take a number of steps that greatly reduce requests made for fonts in the first place. https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...
- auslander 8y agoThere is no mention of which browser they refer to. I don't use Chrome, and I see requests to fonts on every website. And requests do contain Referer (what I browse) and, of course, my IP. And in Private browsing, no caches should be saved anyway.
- extra88 8y agoThey're not referring to what browsers do, they're referring to the Response Headers they return with the resources, e.g. the max-age for the CSS files is one day, the max-age for the fonts files is one year. > And in Private browsing, no caches should be saved anyway. That's one of the trade-offs the user is choosing to make and one of the reasons why those that use Private browsing at all, use it selectively. I believe Private browsing will not re-download web fonts if the browser has already cached them in a non-private window but that's a performance and bandwidth distinction, the CSS request will still be made. The page explicitly states that they use Google Fonts log data in aggregate to show font popularity, that's it. They don't set a cookie and request headers and ips are relatively poor identifiers for individuals. I don't think they use Google Fonts to track one's browsing habits, you're free think that I'm insufficiently paranoid.