If you have been following the ongoing saga between Google and European data regulators, you know that officials recently deemed Google Analytics to be in breach of GDPR laws as it sends data back to non-European servers.

This episode continues as a German regulator has recently ordered a website to pay damages for embedding Google Fonts. This widely used service allows website owners to use a catalog of over 1400+ fonts.

Historically, these fonts have been served from a content delivery network (CDN), which is a geographically distributed network that offers the highest speeds for static resources. However, browsers have recently blocked resources from being cached between sites using CDNs, so this approach is no longer as advantageous.

The issue lies in the IP address tracking. When using a CDN to retrieve the font, small packets of data are sent to Google’s servers to ensure you have the latest version for your browser. This allows Google to track your IP address as part of the transaction. The regulators claim that this IP address, along with other collected data, can allow Google to identify the user.

As many of our sites use Google Fonts, we advise that website owners download the font file and host it directly on their web server. It’s worth noting that there are two major downsides to this approach. The first is speed, as most hosting solutions will not be able to match the speed of Google’s servers. The second issue is maintenance, as you will need to maintain the font artifact and will not be guaranteed to always have the latest version. However, the upside of being compliant and not sending additional data to Google currently outweighs the downsides.

We will continue to monitor the situation and provide recommendations to our customers.

About TEAM IM

TEAM IM is an experienced solution company that advises, develops, implements, supports, and manages enterprise grade processes, information and content management systems. For more than twenty years, TEAM IM has acted as a trusted advisor to our clients through our offices in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the United States. Our mission is to assist our clients to get the most out of their investments in technology. Whether our clients are large government agencies or corporations, construction firms, accounting firms, heavy industry, or smaller organizations, we strive to deliver demonstrable business benefits and generate real return on investment for our clients.

Our products and services offer solutions to transform your business by automating and modernizing your operations. We work hand-in-hand with our clients to understand their goals and create and execute multi-year, continuous improvement plans. Our mission is to support and manage every solution we deliver, so we take care to design long term, future proof, maintainable solutions. We work with best-in-class technology partners that we have carefully selected to ensure we can execute our plan and achieve our clients continuous improvement goals.

Our products and solutions encompass Advisory Services, Implementation Services and Managed Support Services. We specialize in Business Process Automation and Optimization, Content Platforms and Content Services and we are also a leader in Mobile App/Field Services software development and Digital Workplaces. We have industry-specific solutions for the Construction and Accounting Services sectors, and cross-industry solutions for Accounts Payable, Contract Management, App Modernization, Field Services and File Sharing.

At TEAM IM we are passionate about delivering outstanding outcomes for you, our clients.