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Comment by ianpurton | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully we won't see popups like "This site will forward your IP address to Google is that OK?", because I'm already beyond bored with "This site uses cookies do you accept?".

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I too was pissed about the popups until I realized it the companies throwing up the popups that are to blame.

Hosting all your assets by yourself, on your own servers and doing analytics without sending data to a third party is not a terribly tall order.

that is true but it increases the barrier to entry for those who use google fonts for system resource issues, a lot of people offload because they don’t have the space or money to self host everything

one could argue that it is less eco friendly as well given how much space is going to be used repeating the same file on a multitude of servers

A Google font file is just a small file, smaller than most images. You can download it and place is along side your css files.

And seeing how most websites are 20 megs+, the eco argument seems forced.

A $5 VPS comes with several gigabytes of storage. A standard web font (e.g. Roboto) is ~1MB. Bandwidth is essentially free through CloudFlare. Who doesn't have the space or money to self-host their fonts?

This as well would "leak" the IP address to Cloudflare, wouldn't it?

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/trust-hub/gdpr/

> A standard web font (e.g. Roboto) is ~1MB.

Currently on HN frontpage there is an article "How to avoid layout shifts caused by web fonts" [1]. It lists several techniques you can use to reduce font size. One of the examples shows how subsetting reduces Roboto Regular size to 11KB.

[1] https://simonhearne.com/2021/layout-shifts-webfonts/.

(in reply to krehl) And in that specific case you should probably have a DPA ready. Big issue with anything Google-related (and probably CloudFlare) is that they may transfer the data outside of the EU[0].

[0] https://noyb.eu/en/austrian-dsb-eu-us-data-transfers-google-...

I wonder if you can get penalized for sending users' IPs to CloudFlare..

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/trust-hub/gdpr/

Is it really better to tunnel your whole site through CloudFlare than embed a font from Google, from a privacy perspective?

I'm really starting to question why aren't we using fonts that are standard part of browsers? Just have a reasonable sub-set supported by everyone. This would be great climate action too as we would not be wasting energy to redownload them billions if not trillions of time.

Agreed. But why not update what ships with modern OS so that these fonts can be used system-wide? Open Sans, Noto Sans and Roboto for everybody.

You're probably liable to pay the plaintiff 100 EUR for leaking their IP address to CloudFlare, as well as paying 100 EUR for leaking it to Azure/AWS/etc. /partially sarcasm

The Roboto woff2 file is actually only 16kb for each variation, and that's the format most browsers will use in practice.

An interesting question. Someone should do a environment cost impact on self hosting fonts (and other resources) vs client having to make lot's of requests to various hosts for those resources.

None of the standard browsers share third-party cache across different domains. Made it too easy to leak data.

> one could argue that it is less eco friendly as well given how much space is going to be used repeating the same file on a multitude of server

Browsers don't share cache between sites: https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/say-goodbye-to-resource-ca...

Actually, your comment made me wonder how far does this go? Where does "third party" end? If I self host on Hertzner or Linode, I imagine their infrastructure logs IP addresses like Google Fonts here. But surely that doesn't require consent. Why not, what's the difference? What if you host with a much sketchier provider? I could see politicians thinking users would want to know if their requests were served by, say, China or Russia.

For that matter, does the fact that reaching my self hosted site must travel the last mile along a service I paid for (my ISP), mean I must gain consent for using them?

With Hetzner you can get a GDPR compliant Data Processing Agreement (DPA) when using them for hosting.

https://www.hetzner.com/news/vertrag-zur-auftragsverarbeitun...

It's ok that their infrastructure logs IPs that it has to. They commit via their DPA to protecting personal data such as embedded in those logs, not logging what they don't need, not keeping it longer than necessary, only sharing it with third parties that agree similar protections, anonymising and aggregating as needed, etc.

You probably want an agreement like that with a hosting provider for another reason, not just IP logging: They have physical access to all your on site storage, user databases, etc. It's good that they commit to treating data on those physical systems with appropriate respect.

You don’t even need to host yourself the asset, just setup a reverse proxy that drops personal information and redirect the request to the source (Google, or whatever). It’s a simple Nginx rule.

Google rate limits and then blocks your server ip? oops

Doubling your bandwidth costs vs hosting the woff files? oops

Still forwarding the ip address in the X-Forwarded-For header? oops

Not following the license agreements of font providers? my bad

Oh, super simple!

The local bakery down the street just needs to figure out what a reverse proxy is, what a redirect is, and what Nginx is and how set rules for it, and then weigh the pros and cons vs self-hosting assets.

I’m sure that’s easily doable for them, aren’t regulations fun?

No, the bakery’s _website provider_ should do that.

They also will have regulations around financr, health codes, discrimination and hiring, etc etc.

Very few business owners are experts in all regulations when starting. You learn and adjust.

Non-technical users that I’ve seen interacting with these prompts literally just look for the button with the most prominent colour and click it.

Frankly, I’ve even found myself doing this without thinking on occasion. The prompts are beyond useless.

For years I was going in the list of vendors and disabling everything. Now I became so bored by these prompts I decided to instead just accept everything and clean my cookies every week. I’m less frustrated this way, and still feel I have control over my privacy.

Go to uBlock Origin settings and check every item in the 'annoyances' list. I haven't seen a single cookie banner for a few years now.

(This is assuming you're using uBO, because who the hell isn't these days?)

The interesting thing that a lot of services don't consider is that blocking these cookie banners is perfectly allowed and does not implicitly allow services to collect personal data.

Twitter is one of those service that just states "we collect data, deal with it when using this website" (which is already not legal) but the thing is, I don't even see this pop-up because uBlock is filtering it out. If Twitter now collects my personal data, it is not only breaking the opt-in component of GDPR but also doesn't even notify me about data collection.

Quite a lot of services have JS-only popups which I also don't see. Do they collect data? I think so. Do they know they are doing it illegally? I would bet quite a bit of money that they never thought about somebody getting past their cookie banner without consenting, so probably no.

People who have other priorities and interests than technology.

Aka 95% of people out there.

On the other hand, there was a post on the front page recently that said that showing opt-in 3rd party cookie prompts resulted in over 90% refusal rate.

Ignorance is a bliss, but if given a choice to not share extra info with random companies, many will in fact take that opportunity.

So a popup warning that your visit to this website will be recorded by Google may be just what the doctored ordered to shake people of their nirvana and make them look at things a bit more closely.

You'll just see HTTP451 more.

There's no difference between that popup and IP sharing consent. It's not about cookies, it's about tracking and tracking risk.

Smart websites would just host the font files on their own domains but I guess the dumber ones will just add Google Fonts and similar to their consent list, yes.

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