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Back in January this year, the Munich Regional Court ordered a website operator to pay €100 in damages for embedding Google Fonts from the Google CDN on their website, thereby transmitting visitors’ IP addresses to Google without their consent.
According to the court, the unauthorised transmission of the claimant’s IP address to Google by the – unnamed – website infringes the user’s right to privacy, the court said, adding that the website operator could, in theory, combine the information collected with other data from third parties to identify the person behind the IP address. The infringement therefore means that the claimant has lost control over their personal data.
Google Fonts is a CDN service provided by Google for loading and embedding fonts, which enables developers to easily add fonts to their Android apps and websites simply by referencing a stylesheet. In 2022, Google Fonts contained nearly 1,400 font families, and its CDN service is used by more than 50 million websites worldwide.
Under the European Union’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), data such as IP addresses, advertising identifiers and cookies are considered personally identifiable information (PII), so businesses must be required to seek users’ explicit consent before processing such information.
The reason this has now become important is that law firms have started sending ‘cease and desist’ notices (Abmahnung) to website owners in Austria and Germany, along with claims for damages ranging from €1 to €200, which – if they are actually using Google Fonts’ CDN service – must be paid.
For this reason, it has become particularly important for everyone to review and check their website to ensure that the Google Fonts (or similar services) they use are loaded from their own storage space, under their own domain name, rather than using a version hosted by an external provider.
For WordPress websites, there are already ready-made solutions available; the popular Elementor framework includes a built-in option for this, or you can use a third-party plugin, such as OMGF, which replaces style sheets loaded from the cloud with local copies.