Well, let's just take a look at the most benign case where a site owner was sued and convicted by simply using Google Fonts without any bad intentions and without selling or transfering any other data to Google. To Google your IP address will be worthless unless they get any link to your identity, so it solved those really simple cases where site owners accidentially violate the GDPR without any bad intentions and have to fear being sues by some random idiot in court.
> To Google your IP address will be worthless unless they get any link to your identity
Not true. Google is used so widely that they can track and profile me all over the internet, because they can easily combine on which page I've requested fonts from them. And once I log into YouTube, they can link all those information about medical conditions I googled directly to me personally.
- on the benign intent and accidental violation: is it natural to go load fonts from a third party service in the first place ? I get why we arrived at this point, but hosting yourself the base resources you're using for your site shouldn't feel like some huge burden or leap from the norm.
If we really see a shared benefit to having fonts on some common platform, I'd also wish it wasn't Google. Perhaps Cloudflare or Fastly ?
- on IP being worthless to Google: is the "unless they get any link to your identity" even hypothetical ? I am a paying Google customer and extensively use their service. And we all do to some extent; trying the "let me live my daily life but block and avoid anything that touches Google" game would still be as critically punishing today as it was 4 or 5 years ago.
