21-06-22

Google Fonts v GDPR

For a while now Google has made available a whole host of font styles for websites to use and they have also made these fonts available hosted on their own servers across the globe making it very quick and easy to add nice looking fonts to your websites. This can also have the advantage of speeding up the page load times because you are getting the files from an optimised central location.

However a recent German court case, which fined a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-hosted webfonts, has meant that many website authors are now spending time changing the way they use fonts on their websites. The main issue in this case was that by using fonts in this way you are exposing the website user’s IP address to Google.

We very rarely use fonts in this way on our sites and a comprehensive check of all our sites only found a couple of instances of this on some development sites, all of which have now been updated. But this all goes to show that we need to keep vigilant across many aspects of website development to help keep all our websites safe and secure.