Hacker News Reader

Comment by guaka | Hacker News Reader

For website of a purist software freedom company I was surprised to see Privacy Badger show up with a red 5:

ajax.googleapis.com fonts.googleapis.com secure.gravatar.com fonts.gstatic.com code.jquery.com

Can someone explain why you would want to link to fonts/js libraries rather than have a copy on the server and server that yourself?

One reason would be that the browser will cache them if they are used in multiple sites, so loading will be much faster on subsequent sites using the same resources. Another might be that such resources load faster off a CDN than your own server.

In practice, this never happens. The value is certainly less than the data you're selling about your users to Google.

What data are you giving to Google (or another CDN) by loading jQuery or a font from them? What does the ToS say? Genuine question.

Edit: here's the ToS: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/terms If you believe Google, they're not collecting anything.

Don't be naive.

Value to whom? The site loads faster (so people like it slightly better), it's easier to maintain (less files to serve and keep track of), all for the cost of something the site owners didn't pay for in the first place.

This is often repeated but without any data to back it up its a bit of a myth.

My tests show local resources consistently loading faster than making a link to Google. These are supposed to be cached but thing like fonts are always loaded again. Anyone can repeat this for themselves.

> Anyone can repeat this for themselves.

I tried, they came from the disk cache.

Use decentraleyes!

https://decentraleyes.org/

> Protects you against tracking through "free", centralized, content delivery. It prevents a lot of requests from reaching networks like Google Hosted Libraries, and serves local files to keep sites from breaking. Complements regular content blockers.

What's wrong with any of those things?

Libraries are probably fine, but pulling them from Google means that Google can track you

Probably but those domains are meant to be cookie less for speed

They still know which IP address is loading it. And I do often see cookies on CDNs in uBlock Matrix.

Don't know how I never put this together. Good (cynical) explanation for Google fonts.

Don’t mistake their generosity for generosity.

This is not cynical, it's realistic. After all, tracking users is closely tied to their main source of income. It is not a coincidence that most pages use Google Analytics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com