Google Fonts Warning: Here Is What Google Says About It

The warnings in connection with Google Fonts have been causing a stir in Europe for a while. The matter has now also reached the headquarters of the search engine giant and Google has now commented on it.

Since last summer, dubious lawyers and the plaintiffs behind them have repeatedly caused waves of warnings in connection with violations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Strictly speaking, anyone who does not integrate Google Fonts locally is guilty of such a GDPR violation.

Because if these fonts are not stored locally, the browser downloads them from an external server. According to a Munich court ruling from the beginning of the year, personal data is sent to Google via the associated server, namely in the USA.

There is a lot of criticism of this legal decision and also of the technical interpretation, but the fact is that there is a corresponding judgment – and that opens up the possibility for dubious lawyers to issue a warning. Now the search engine giant from Mountain View, California has also commented on this and published a statement in a blog post.

It first explains what it’s all about: “Google Fonts is a library of open-source font families and a web API that allows these font families to be embedded in websites. People want the websites they visit, well designed, easy to use, and respect their privacy.”

Google further emphasizes that it respects privacy: “The Google Fonts Web API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of data to what is necessary for the efficient delivery of fonts and for aggregated usage statistics. This data is kept secure and separate from other data.”

This is how the internet works

Finally, the company assures that the data will only be used for Google Fonts: “Google does not use the information collected by Google Fonts for any other purpose and in particular not for profiling end users or for advertising. In addition, the fact that the Servers from Google necessarily receive IP addresses in order to transmit fonts is not unique to Google and corresponds to the way the Internet works.”