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It really depends on the relevant counterfactual; yours makes total sense from the vantage point of lots of developers, but I tend to prioritize privacy and aut

It really depends on the relevant counterfactual; yours makes total sense from the vantage point of lots of developers, but I tend to prioritize privacy and autonomy. When I visit catphotos.wordpress.com, my intention is not to leak information to Google even though they have great fonts. My intention is just to visit the website. So the counterfactual I would frame the discussion with would be something more like self-hosting fonts by default and prioritizing privacy over performance (different strokes for different folks, and I realize it can be a significant performance hit). To respond to your "more common the hosting site is" comment, Wordpress is also extremely common, and they probably could have devised alternative solutions by making different trade-offs. Cache behavior resulting in fewer requests can be a double-edged sword, too: if you cache fonts with clients, you're probably also caching a bunch of other things that may decrease your privacy in other ways. There are many layers of indirection, especially with NSA/GCHQ/Verizon. I wouldn't argue that this and another services offered by Google don't add value for developers and even users (they absolutely do), but my argument is mainly that there are costs--maybe distant/abstract/indirect costs in terms of privacy/autonomy that are difficult to discuss in concrete terms, but costs worth considering nonetheless. I wish WordPress had been more thoughtful about the trade-offs they made.

lallysingh 12y ago
I agree with everything you say. I think that we're still very early in developing acceptable norms for privacy -- we'll sadly have to have real collateral damage before people wake up to it. I don't know how to proceed in developing the terminology, calculus, and as a result, standards and norms for good privacy without going either "screw it all, your reality is now public information" or "pre-paid gsm phone modem to tor/privoxy". It's the middle bit that has the reasonable space in there, but it's hard to track down and there are certainly different reasonable spaces there for different people. Ugh.
acdha 12y ago
> I wish WordPress had been more thoughtful about the trade-offs they made More accurately, you wish that WordPress had agreed with your priorities. They clearly did think about this and made a different decision and it's unfair to suggest otherwise.
harryjo 12y ago
If you don't want Google to know about catphotos, you can download all the fonts from google every day, so they stay in your cache and don't relate at all to your browsing.

lallysingh 12y ago

I agree with everything you say. I think that we're still very early in developing acceptable norms for privacy -- we'll sadly have to have real collateral damage before people wake up to it. I don't know how to proceed in developing the terminology, calculus, and as a result, standards and norms for good privacy without going either "screw it all, your reality is now public information" or "pre-paid gsm phone modem to tor/privoxy". It's the middle bit that has the reasonable space in there, but it's hard to track down and there are certainly different reasonable spaces there for different people. Ugh.

acdha 12y ago

> I wish WordPress had been more thoughtful about the trade-offs they made More accurately, you wish that WordPress had agreed with your priorities. They clearly did think about this and made a different decision and it's unfair to suggest otherwise.

harryjo 12y ago

If you don't want Google to know about catphotos, you can download all the fonts from google every day, so they stay in your cache and don't relate at all to your browsing.