Discussions on the GDPR rules are still going on. GDPR is a pack of laws protecting European citizens’ data from unauthorized use and security breaches. The rules are indeed in favor of the citizens, but in some cases, results might affect the internet giants as well. One of the most recent examples was related to Google Analytics, which website owners use to understand their target audience better.
More than 50 million websites are using Google Fonts
A new rule came from a regional court in Munich, Germany, and fined a website owner for using Google Fonts service. The fine is just €100, nothing big. However, the related service is just a simple font repository that helps web developers use the fonts without hosting them on the server.
When a user comes to a website that has Google Fonts, the IP address goes to Google servers because of the nature of the HTTP protocol, and Google sends the related fonts to the user. Google Fonts is currently hosting more than 1,300 font families used by more than 50 million websites.
Good, old self-hosted fonts
The German court has decided that transferring the IP address without consent breaks the GDPR rules. The court also stated that the defendant could also use Google Fonts without a connection to a Google server is established, and the IP address of the website user is transmitted to Google, which translates into hosting all the fonts on the website’s servers. This solution advice makes Google Fonts completely obsolete and makes website owners put all the fonts required into the server manually in an old-fashioned way.