How to Make Google Fonts GDPR Compliant

Alert: Legal authorities could sue you if you are using Google Fonts API on your website!

Data privacy and the protection of personal information is a serious concern for websites. Especially for the websites serving users from the European Union (EU) region, which are shielded by the toughest privacy and data protection law in the world — The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In January 2022, the Datenschutzbehörde (Federal Ministry of Justice, Austria) penalized an unidentified website for using Google Analytics (GA) services and sending users’ private information to Google without their consent. The regional court of Munich, Germany ordered the website owner to pay a penalty of €100 for the violation of article 44 of the GDPR rule.

This puts a big question mark on the compliance of the company’s other services as well such as Google Font API with the GDPR rule.

Recently, the ‘compliance of Google Fonts API with the GDPR rule’ has remained a hot topic for webmasters around the world with the courts penalizing websites using third-party fonts services such as Google Fonts for breaching the end-users privacy.

Let’s explore more about Google Fonts GDPR compliance.

Are Google Fonts GDPR Compliant?

No, Google Fonts are not GDPR compliant.

Google Fonts is a web font service that offers API to deliver font files. Google Fonts collects the requests from the users, fetches the files from its servers, and delivers them to the end users to produce fonts. In this process, Google’s server needs the receiver’s IP address to deliver the files.

According to the GDPR rule, an IP address is a personal information, which can be used for identifying the user. Sharing such personal information of the users with third-party services without their consent violates the right to informational self-determination of the user. Thus, Google Fonts violates GDPR.

In January 2022, the German Court declared that Google Fonts is not compliant with GDPR/DSGVO. Therefore, websites using Google Fonts API are currently on the radar of the EU’s GDPR authority.

EU GDPR’s Massive Slap on Google’s Typeface

According to BuiltWith, more than 57 million live sites are currently using Google Fonts API. The decisions taken by the German court regarding the GDPR compliance of third-party font services such as Google Fonts are set to create great chaos amongst this massive community of website owners.

The fine of using Google Fonts on websites can hit harder businesses. According to the sources, the Google Fonts GDPR fine can go up to €250,000 per infringement. Prevent such hefty penalties by making Google Fonts GDPR compliant on your website.

Prepare Your Website For Google Fonts GDPR Compliance

You need to self-host the Google Fonts in your server in order to comply with the GDPR rule. If you are not a tech-savvy person, we recommend seeking help from technical experts to help you host Google fonts locally on your server. Our team of expert developers will help you make Google Fonts GDPR-compliant by hosting them on your local server. Meetanshi’s professionals can help you make Google Fonts comply with the GDPR rule on your Magento or WordPress site. Talk to us now!