@danbars Sure, thanks for asking!
Of course, Google Fonts can't inject any analytics script onto your website. However, Google has access to your visitors' IP addresses, GeoLocation, browser versions, and operating systems. They also have access to the URL your users are on.
Using all of this data, Google can assemble a rough estimate of how many people visit your website and who they are. All without you knowing.
I hope this answers your question.
@tobihrbr
Theoretically they could, but:
1. Font files are cached by the browser across sites, so if your browser already downloaded some font it will not be downloaded again.
2. The domain from which it is served is not google.com so users' identity is not sent
3. Google themselves are saying that they are not using this data to track visitors. Only to track the popularity of fonts. You can read about it here https://developers.google.com/fo...
Bottom line, sorry to be the party popper, but I don't see any good reason to use your service. It will just slow down my site, I will pay for hosting, and not really gain any benefit.
Did you get any feedback that this solves someone's problem?
@danbars thanks for your feedback. But there are a few things I want to set straight:
The user's identity is not sent to Google, but I never said that.
Though fonts are cached by the browser. Google will still get a request at least once per day (since the cache TTL is 86400 seconds). This request includes the `referrer`-property, which can be used to track the domain and even the path the user is visiting. In addition, they also get the user's IP address, which can be used to find the rough location of the user.
I know that Google says their service does not track anyone. However, their DNS service, 8.8.8.8, is known to (at least partially) track resolved domains. So I don't completely trust them on that.
Fontless caches Fonts and uses Vercel's CDN, which is very fast. So performance is practically the same. Vercel's free personal plan includes 100GB of bandwidth per month, which should be enough for most users. So you probably won't have to pay.
I also want to make clear that I don't think Google uses Google Fonts to track anyone personally. However, Google Fonts is a black box and no one outside Google really knows what's going on. They might use it for very basic tracking like they do with 8.8.8.8. I think Google offering a font-service, which probably serves multiple petabytes or at least may terabytes of data every month, for free sounds too good to be true.
I mostly built Fontless for my own needs, since self-hosting fonts has a few benefits but I still like the simplicity you gain with a fonts service, like Google Fonts.
But I completely get your critique. If you're more comfortable using Google Fonts that's absolutely fine.
@tobihrbr thanks for the detailed reply.
Google holds data about the Internet and users in so many ways, from chrome, to analytics, adsense, cloud-servers, mobile phones and more.
I admire your decision to fight this even though it's one small frontier. Really, not being cynical.
For me, I will likely keep using their services directly 🙃
@danbars You're absolutely right. Fontless is definitly just a very tiny step. It is by no means ment to replace Google Fonts (it event depends on it).
Thank you so much for your feedback!
@brian_teeman Currently Fontless does not support variable fonts. However, it uses woff and woff2 which are pretty efficient anyway.
Is this something you need?
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