Google Fonts sanctions the privacy of the website by the German court The Register

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Earlier this month, a German court fined an unidentified website 100 ($ 110.84) for violating EU privacy law by importing a Google-hosted web font.

The decision, of the third civil chamber of the Landgericht Mnchen in Munich, found that the website, by including the font hosted by Google-Fonts in its pages, transmitted the IP address of the unidentified actor to Google without authorization and without a legitimate reason to do so. And that violates Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

That is to say, when the actor visited the website, the page made the user’s browser take a font from Google Fonts to use for some text, and this revealed the netizen’s IP address to the giant. of the United States Internet. This type of hot link is normal with Google Fonts; the problem here is that the visitor apparently did not authorize the sharing of their IP address. The website could have avoided this drama by self-hosting the font if possible.

“The unauthorized disclosure of the plaintiff’s dynamic IP address to Google constitutes a violation of the general right of personality in the form of the right to informational self-determination under 823 paragraph 1 BGB,” the ruling stated, as algorithmically translated. “The right to informative self-determination includes the right of the individual to disclose and determine the use of their personal data”.

The decision states that IP addresses represent personal data because it is theoretically possible to identify the person associated with an IP address and that it is irrelevant whether the website or Google actually did.

Google Fonts font selector … With our sample text in light of this case

“The defendant violated the plaintiff’s right to informational self-determination by forwarding the dynamic IP address to Google when the plaintiff accessed the defendant’s website,” the ruling said.

The ruling orders the website to stop providing IP addresses to Google and threatens the site operator with a fine of 250,000 for each violation, or up to six months’ imprisonment, for continued misuse of Google Fonts.

Google Fonts is widely distributed, the Google Fonts API is used by around 50 million websites. The API allows websites to style text with Google Fonts stored on remote Google servers or CDNs which are fetched during loading of the page. Google Fonts can be hosted independently to avoid breaking EU rules and the ruling explicitly mentions this possibility to state that relying on Google Fonts hosted by Google is not defensible under the law.

The German court ruling echoes two other recent decisions, one in early January by the Austrian data protection authority which found the use of Google Analytics violated the law and one in December last year when a Another German court found that a Danish consent handler’s CookieBot program was sharing European IP addresses with US-based Akamai in violation of EU data laws.

These data privacy judgments complicate how websites and applications can integrate remotely hosted content or services by requiring a legitimate purpose to do so if personal data is transferred or legitimate consent.

They reflect the consequences of the EU Court of Justice’s 2020 decision to cancel the Privacy Shield data protection agreements that previously allowed US companies to exchange data with European partners under the “standard contractual clauses” “. That ruling is known as Schrems II because it originated with the 2011 complaint by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems against Facebook in Ireland.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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