Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Question: Does Google use Google Fonts to track users across the web?

Google's FAQ [1] says that it only collects the information needed to serve fonts, but it says the generic Google privacy policy applies. The Google Privacy Policy allows them to use any information it collects for advertising purposes.

While Google also states that requests do not contain cookies, Google Chrome will automatically send a high-entropy [3], persistent identifier on all requests to Google properties, and this cannot be disabled (X-client-data) [2]. Google can use this X-client-data, combined with the useragent's IP address, to uniquely identify each Chrome user, without cookies.

So, perhaps the privacy statement is more of a sneakily worded non-denial?

[1]: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what_does_usin...

[2]: https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/467#issuecom...

[3]: A sample: `X-client-data: CIS2yQEIprbJAZjBtskBCKmdygEI8J/KAQjLrsoBCL2wygEI97TKAQiVtcoBCO21ygEYq6TKARjWscoB` - looks very high entropy to me!

> Google Chrome will automatically send a high-entropy [3], persistent identifier on all requests to Google properties, and this cannot be disabled (X-client-data) [2].

X-Client-Data indicates which experiment variations are active in Chrome:

Additionally, a subset of low entropy variations are included in network requests sent to Google. The combined state of these variations is non-identifying, since it is based on a 13-bit low entropy value (see above). These are transmitted using the "X-Client-Data" HTTP header, which contains a list of active variations. On Android, this header may include a limited set of external server-side experiments, which may affect the Chrome installation. This header is used to evaluate the effect on Google servers - for example, a networking change may affect YouTube video load speed or an Omnibox ranking update may result in more helpful Google Search results. -- https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#variat...

Google doesn't use fingerprinting for ad targeting, through like with IP, UA, etc it receives the information it would need if it were going to. I don't see a way Google could demonstrate this publicly, though, except an audit (which would show that X-Client-Data is only used for the evaluation of Chrome variations.)

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

Thanks for the informative answer. I still have trust in engineers and assume truth and good faith, so that's is comforting to know.

You could always ask someone who works on Google Fonts. I did just that. The answer is they don't use the logs for much apart from counting how many people use each font to draw pretty graphs.

Doesn't mean that won't change in the future though. But log retention is only a matter of days, so they can't retrospectively change what they do to invade your privacy.

I find myself wondering whether Google’s front end implements a fully generic tracker: collect source address and headers and forward it to an analytics system. The developers involved in each individual Google property behind the front end might not even know it’s there. Correlating the headers with the set of URLs hit and their timing might give quite a lot of information about the pages being visited.

I hope Google doesn’t do this, but I would not be entirely surprised if they did.

Unless it's regularly verified by a trusted third party, such as a government agency, I wouldn't trust them not to. After all: we're talking about a corporation that lives off the data it gathers about people using their services and products.

If the frontend had a fully generic tracker, teams wouldn't need to set up their own logging and stats systems... Which they do...

I think they would in any case. My impression is that data is siloed internally at Google, and that data sharing between departments would be way more complex than just setting up some (possibly redundant) logging.

I spent ten seconds thinking about the logistics of adding logging to the frontends, and...

Well, obviously I can't say for sure they don't have any. I didn't look it up, and if I had I wouldn't be able to tell you. But since I didn't, I can tell you that the concept seems completely infeasible. There's too much traffic, and nowhere to put them.

Besides that, not everything is legal to log. The frontends don't know what they're seeing, though; they're generic reverse proxies. So...

> completely infeasible. There's too much traffic, and nowhere to put them

If there’s one company in the world for whom bandwidth and storage are not an issue, it’s Google.

It sounds so easy to make, yet so useful, that I can't see how they wouldn't do that. Deontology has been thrown out Google's window a long time ago.

I just went for the easy solution and disabled web fonts. Comes with the drawback that many site UIs are now at least partially broken (especially since some developers had the bright idea to use fonts for UI icons), though flashier sites tend to come with less interesting content anyway.

But as it stands I don't want to trust Google, Facebook etc. more than absolutely necessary. They have lost every right to that a long time ago and are incentivized by their business model to not change anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com