Google fonts and GDPR again

  • joeysl · Member ·

    Hello everyone,

    after a recent ruling by a German court adjudging damages because of the online use of Google Fonts there are cease-and-desist warnings being sent widely. To date it is unsure if this practice will uphold in the long run, but for now the only safe solution seems to be turning off the online integration of Google Fonts altogether.

    The only thread I could find on the topic is this one:
    https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/news-about-google-fonts-and-gdpr/

    Have there been any updates in this regard since then? I would really like to keep my current theme as it fits my purpose perfectly. Also I’d rather not meddle with plug-ins myself in order to keep maintenance of my website easy. For now I might be forced to set it to private.

    Do you have any suggestions how to handle the situation?

    Thanks a lot,
    Joey

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-heroponriki · Staff ·

    We are aware of this ruling but are unable to give you advice about whether or not it applies to you and your own use of Google Fonts on your site. If you have concerns about your own GDPR compliance you should consult an attorney.

    It is not currently possible to disable Google Fonts that are loaded via the Google CDN for your site. If it is important to you that your site does not provide Google Fonts from the CDN, there are two options:

    1. Use one of the following block themes, which bundle the fonts locally, instead of sourcing them from Google directly:

    – Ames
    – Antonia
    – Appleton
    – Arbutus
    – Attar
    – Barnett
    – Bennett
    – Blank Canvas
    – Blockbase
    – Calvin
    – Dorna
    – Farrow
    – Geologist
    – Geologist Blue/Cream/Slate/Yellow
    – Hari
    – Heiwa
    – Jackson
    – Kingsley
    – Marl
    – Mayland (Blocks)
    – Meraki
    – Quadrat
    – Quadrat Black/Green/Red/White/Yellow
    – Russell
    – Seedlet (Blocks)
    – Varese
    – Winkel
    – Zoologist

    2. Upgrade to the WordPress.com Business plan, which allows more control over fonts on your site.

    I hope that helps!

  • joeysl · Member ·

    Thank you very much for the list. I will look into those themes!

  • glueckwien · Member ·

    Hello, is it sure that these themes don’t load Google fonts? I switched to Seedlet and checked it again and the checker page tells me that the problem consists!

  • quartettblog · Member ·

    It would be very good if wordpress would take care of this issue as soon as possible. This should actually be self-evident.

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Hello, is it sure that these themes don’t load Google fonts? I switched to Seedlet and checked it again and the checker page tells me that the problem consists!

    The block themes and all of its Child themes provide fonts locally therefore should be compliant with GDPR standards. All of the same fonts should be available. So, it’ll load the fonts, but locally.

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    @glueckwien

    I switched to Seedlet and checked it again and the checker page tells me that the problem consists!

    You’ll need to use Seedlet (Blocks), which is a separate theme to the regular Seedlet. I recall it was available in our Theme dashboard, but I don’t see it any longer.

    Maybe try again with one of the other themes that staff mentioned in their reply, other than Mayland (Blocks), which also doesn’t seem to be available.

  • joeysl · Member ·

    I have installed one of the suggested block themes (Appleton) and I still see google fonts loading from fonts.gstatic.com in my browser’s Dev Tools.

    All the other themes I tried (nearly all of them) were the same.

    Am I doing something wrong?

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    We’re checking on this & will update you soon. Thanks for your patience.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    @joeysl, can you try viewing the site in an incognito window, or logged out, to see if you that resource then?

    It looks like it’s probably coming from your notifications, which your users won’t see.

  • joeysl · Member ·

    I tried both incognito and logged out, and I still see that request from fonts.gstatic.com. However, I am not sure what “Status Code 200 from memory cache” means:

    “Request URL: https://fonts.gstatic.com/..
    Request Method: GET
    Status Code: [green] 200 (from memory cache)
    Remote Address: ..
    Referrer Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin”

  • staff-heroponriki · Staff ·

    However, I am not sure what “Status Code 200 from memory cache” means:

    It means your browser is serving a locally cached version of your page. Try clearing your browser’s cache and cookies and check again.

    If you still have the problem, please provide some screenshots of the response from the console. You can upload them to your media library (which Staff can access) or to a service like Snipboard.io to upload the screenshot and then share the image link from that service here.

    Once we have that information, we’ll take a closer look.

    Thanks!

  • glueckwien · Member ·

    Can you please be so kind and point to four or five themes that are usable for blogs with several sites and DON’T load google fonts? They can not be filtered out on the chosing table for themes.

    We have heavy justive issues occurring in Germany and Austria due to this inconvenience and I have spent already several hours on that. I tried a big part of the list and it turned out useless, only single sites and such things.

    The best thing would be a simple swith for all of us: load google fonts ON or OFF and that’s it. To get that via plugins we shall pay 25 $ per month. So, alternatively I can only shut off my whole blog.

    I am sure most other users feel the same.

    Thank you!

  • staff-heroponriki · Staff ·

    @glueckwien: The second response to this thread lists themes that load the fonts locally:

    https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/google-fonts-and-gdpr-again/?view=all#post-3855954

    I hope that helps!

  • joeysl · Member ·

    I tried it earlier after emptying my cache. Tried again now after deleting cookies and emptying cache again. It’s still the same.

    I made two screenshots and uploaded them to my media library. Can staff access them while my website is on private?

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hey @joeysl, your site doesn’t need to be private for staff to see it, but yeah we can see that. Just to clarify, though, this font is coming from the black bar at the top of the page (your notifications, specifically).

    You should only see that font if you are logged in. So testing in an incognito window, logged out, you wouldn’t see it. I’d confirmed this yesterday. But with your site private you won’t be able to do that test.

  • joeysl · Member ·

    I had my site set to public for the test and was logged out, then cleared my cache and cookies and opened it in incognito mode.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    If you are able to make it public again and share the affected page or post, we can try to determine where that’s coming from.

  • joeysl · Member ·

    I’ve just made my site public for this test. As far as I can tell it affects all pages and posts.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Thanks. Here’s what I see:

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