Python Web Apps that Fly with CDNs Transcripts
Chapter: Fonts
Lecture: But it's an ad company
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So what's the problem with just using things like Google Fonts? Well, fundamentally, the problem is that at the very heart of it,
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Google is just an advertising company. They buy and sell our information and they treat you as the product.
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And so many of their services have been marketed as do no evil, let's get out there and just make the web a better place.
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And not detracting the good work, that they have done for certain things, Many of these come with very subtle but negative trade-offs.
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For example, did you know if you try to embed a YouTube document or a YouTube video onto your page,
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that puts a whole host of tracking on top of your users? Even if you just link to the YouTube image from a YouTube video,
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that puts cookies onto your users. And Google Fonts is the same way.
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So while it might seem like Google is putting these fonts out to help us to make things better
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so that everyone on the web, it's going to be free and it's going to be amazing, we're going to help you.
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Oh, and by the way, wouldn't this be a great way to just track everyone?
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So, yes, that's ultimately the problem is these services are being provided to us
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by companies that are making this trade-off between web developers and Google. But that's not who's getting tracked, not really.
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The people getting tracked are the visitors to the website who don't know anything about it. They're like, oh, that's a cool-looking website
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I love its font. Oh, yeah. Did you know you now are being tracked? So check out this article
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website find by German court for leaking visitors IP addresses via Google fonts
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So short version even using something like Google fonts is a GDPR violation unless you explicitly
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Let people know and make them opt-in and what are you gonna do if they say no? have the wrong fonts potentially,
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but that's gonna be a design nightmare. So Google Fonts, not a great answer. Turns out we have a really good one for you.
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This is not a negative chapter, I just wanna set the stage for the challenge here.