Google’s marketing strategy is certainly ingenious. What if we offered a thousand fonts to the whole world? Available through ready-made websites like WordPress.

Google Fonts: A permanent global online resource. Because of Google Fonts, you’re already sharing your data before you’ve even seen the website. What data? The Google FAQ provides the answer:

“When end users visit a website that embeds Google Fonts, their browsers send HTTP requests to the Google Fonts Web API. This includes the IP address, the requested URL, the HTTP headers, the user agent of the web browser, the operating system version, the referrer URL,” and so on.

Which websites are affected? Primarily pre-built websites, such as WordPress sites. There are currently 605 million WordPress websites. That gives Google a nice overview—constantly, 24/7. Every day you’re online is logged. That adds up over the course of a year. That’s why we no longer talk about hackers and police forensic experts. They can only spy on individuals. Take a look at what Google and the like are doing. That’s where the action is. That’s where the data really piles up.
How can you tell if a website uses Google Fonts? We look directly at the HTML code. Right-click on the website and select “View Source” from the menu. We see the source code, or HTML code, of the website. You can search through it: Ctrl+F, or Command+F on a Mac. F stands for “Find.” Americans don’t search for long—they just find what they’re looking for. We type in the first three letters of our beloved corporation, click two or three times, and there’s the corpus delicti: Fonts googleapis.com.

The vast majority of websites feature the Google Font. How did this come about? Convenience is the enemy of freedom. WordPress and similar platform designers select it from a drop-down list. However, the fact that it comes from Google doesn’t bother Google at all. Google has even been suggesting for years—in various forms—that you should host the font yourself. Here’s what they say in the Google FAQ:

“Instead of fetching fonts from Google’s servers, developers can host web fonts locally on their website by downloading the fonts and uploading them to their server. When a font is loaded from the website operator’s servers, Google does not receive any data about the website’s visitors.”

There you have it! But nobody does that. They probably don’t care, and everyone else is doing it too—hundreds of millions of others.

WordPress websites didn’t really take off until after 2007, when Big Tech completely took over the internet—because in 2007, the internet came to mobile phones with the iPhone 1, and all the Google tools were introduced via WordPress. Before that, web designers could only choose from nine to ten fonts—namely, the ones everyone had on their PCs. There was no way to download fonts until resourceful entrepreneurs offered exactly that: fonts for website operators to download, for a fee.

Now, Google’s marketing strategy is truly ingenious. What if we offered a thousand fonts to the whole world? Available for selection through ready-made websites like WordPress. If hundreds of millions of websites need something from us, if their visitors all had to download something from us, then we’d see their IP addresses, location, time, browser version, operating system, and so on. From every single one, every day, 24/7, all year round. Then we’d see the online activity of website visitors all over the world.

And that’s the result! By offering Google Fonts, Google tracks your movements across the internet every day, 24/7, all year round—because the vast majority of websites retrieve the fonts they need from Google’s servers instead of hosting them themselves. Google’s marketing team has truly pulled off a masterstroke here! Keep in mind: whenever you retrieve something from another server, that server receives a record of your visit. That’s why we always host our fonts on our own server.

This is another post on the topic “If no one else says it, I’ll say it.” You can watch more videos anytime at blog.muinar.ch—free from surveillance and ad interruptions. You can also like, subscribe to, and comment on the video at blog.muinar.ch without feeding any algorithm. If you need a website that doesn’t send your visitor data to Silicon Valley, check out muinar.ch. That’s it for today. Thanks for stopping by, and see you next time.