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Comment by discardable_dan | Hacker News Reader

This is the essence of CDNs, though. Every offsite CDN is subject to this same ruling, meaning any developer trying to use a third-party CDN for something as simply as loading jQuery is subject to this. For example, on load, https://evanandkatelyn.com/ grabs stuff from: twitch.tv (embedded player), youtube.com (embedded player), facebook.com (likely just a like button), and what I assume are several wordpress CDNs (c0.wp.com, i0.wp.com, s.w.org, ssl.p.jwpcdn.com).

If this ruling is upheld, either (a) browsers need to immediately stop interpreting these commands, instead providing user prompts for _each offsite load event_, or (b) a very large swath of websites are all open to the same legal issue. As a small example, the Aesop wine company site (https://www.aesopwines.com/), made with Squarespace, uses typekit, squarespace, and google CDN loads. They're subject to the same ruling, right? And so on, and so on...

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> browsers need to immediately stop interpreting these commands, instead providing user prompts for _each offsite load event_

No, why should they? The ruling makes the (pretty realistic) assumption that users are in no position to decide about individual load requests. Therefore, those are the responsibility of the site author.

This way to interpret the events seems most consistent with real-world usage. Meanwhile pretending the user is responsible to vet any individual network requests seems like a legal fiction - except there is no reason why it should be applied.

By this argument, then, should third party requests always be blocked? If the user "is in no position to decide", that means that the only way to avoid potential liability would be to load everything from the same domain, right? No CDNs, no off-site scripts, no off-site embeds, ever. Seems a bit extreme to me.

Thoughts my own, not those of my employer.

To my knowledge, there are other avenues beside consent under which the GDPR allows data exchange with third parties - in particular if such an exchange is essential for fulfilling the service. The point here was though, that the data exchange was not "essential" because you could simply self-host the fonts or proxy the request through your own servers.

But yes, it would seems to me that this interpretation of the law sort of communicates that third party requests should be a measure of last resort. That would definitely cause a shift in current web dev practices, but I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

> avoid potential liability

I think "potential" liability is an odd criterion. Any law is a risk of potential liability. If the effort to find out if a law actually applies to you is already too much, then I guess anything less than anarcho-capitalism would be unacceptable.

> self-host the fonts

Do you, as the website operator, have the right to copy and serve these fonts to your visitors? (Actual question; my guess is that you don't according to Google Fonts, but could be wrong.)

> proxy the request through your own servers

Isn't this worse? Assume that your visitor does not want Google contacted at all as part of their visit; isn't, then, the potential leak of an IP address simply a side effect? The website is still leaking timing of when a visitor accessed the site, potentially their usage patterns...

Personally, I think this is a bit of an absurd argument... I think, at most, consent should be enough for third party requests. I was mostly responding to GP's claim that the user can't reasonably consent to such use.

> Do you, as the website operator, have the right to copy and serve these fonts to your visitors?

Good question. I have no idea, but apparently the court thinks self-hosting is ok in this case.

> Isn't this worse? Assume that your visitor does not want Google contacted at all as part of their visit; isn't, then, the potential leak of an IP address simply a side effect? The website is still leaking timing of when a visitor accessed the site, potentially their usage patterns...

There is a specific set of data which is defined as "personally identifiable information". IP address is part of that set, but I don't think timing information or anonymous usage data are. So the question in this case is specifically "does the request leak information defined as PII?". You can prevent that effectively with proxying: Google would only see the IP address of your proxy but not the address of the user.

> Assume that your visitor does not want Google contacted at all as part of their visit

I don't think a user can enforce this under the GDPR. They only have a right to block you from sending their PII to Google, not to block you from talking to Google at all.

> There is a specific set of data which is defined as "personally identifiable information".

I believe there isn't and that is part of the problem with GDPR in my experience.

> Do you, as the website operator, have the right to copy and serve these fonts to your visitors?

All the fonts on Google Fonts are open source. When GDPR came into force in 2018 I downloaded all the fonts I needed, checked their licenses, and uploaded them on my servers along with necessary notices as required by the licenses.

The matter could also be sidestepped if the CDN were to offer a GDPR data processing agreement (DPA) and would make guarantees about the locations of servers. The free public CDNs understandably don't do this, and it seems Google Fonts is not covered by the Google Cloud DPA.

At least in Germany (possibly also other European countries) a design pattern only loading Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/... content with explicit user consent is nowadays pretty common.

But shouldn't the site owner pay for a CDN and host the resources themselves? In which case the CDN wouldn't own the IP information. I think the problem here is that the website author is getting free bandwidth in exchange for their user's IP address, which in the example Google can then use for tracking and other things in exchange.

> But shouldn't the site owner pay for a CDN and host the resources themselves?

Not sure I understand this. Whether you pay for a CDN or not, you'll still be guilty of sending the user's browser to an external domain without consent (because it happens before the page is fully loaded). The only GDPR-compliant solution seems to be self-hosting everything.

That's true but the mitigation to that is that it would have been OK if the user has consented to this "data processing".

The court isn't ruling this sort of technology en bloc but says in its ruling that it is a problem because the user didn't consent to his personal data (IP address) being given to a third party (Google in this case).

Personally I have mixed feelings about this ruling too because this sort of technical solution is widespread and an army of GDPR vigilantes has the potential to cripple large portions of the web by filing similar suits. Or we won't be able to access websites without having to go through entire multi-page EULAs and consent forms for every and all kinds of similar 3rdparty technology embedding.

Law is a blunt tool and will have unintended consequences, unfortunately :(

A lot of websites won't serve addresses from Germany.

I've seen companies doing that with just the GDPR cookie warning, it wasn't worth rewriting code and annoy non-EU people with the warning so the detect IP address and redirect to a page saying they don't serve that region.

Let's be honest, what have we gain from the cookie warning?

That is a minority and mostly only US-centric sites that are otherwise chock full of advertising/tracking technology - exactly what was GDPR meant to deal with.

However, GDPR and this type of ruling has EU-wide impact because of the single market (e.g. a French website can and does server also German customers). Businesses (especially the ones from the EU) can't afford to not comply or to not serve customers within the EU.

That is where the problem is.

There is an important point to this ruling that shouldn't be omitted:

> Der Einsatz von Schriftartendiensten wie Google Fonts kann nicht auf Art. 6 Abs. 1 S.1 lit. f DSGVO gestützt werden, da der Einsatz der Schriftarten auch möglich ist, ohne dass eine Verbindung von Besuchern zu Google Servern hergestellt werden muss.

To roughly translate: One can use Google Fonts without forcing users to make a request to google servers (by downloading the fonts and serving them locally) so this doesn't fall under GDPR (which allows sharing/using user data if it is necessary for functionality).

Which would most likely include CDNs but a point could be made for things like youtube and twitch where that isn't really possible/feasible.

Edit: One addition to the "necessary" part: Necessary for what the USER wants to do when visiting your site. Might be arguing semantics but this is law after all, which is all about semantics

Then get Squarespace to stop pinging random third parties on page load. The website owner is paying for Squarespace, why is it loading Google CDN (and Google trackers?)

It's loading fonts. So squarespace needs to host those fonts, fine. But more to the point, it could be argued even the Squarespace CDN is "different" from the actual website, so we need CDN shims that forward local domain requests to the CDNs and return the results. All to hide an IP number for downloading fonts." Moreover, "host it yourself" is easy if you're technically skilled, but very, very difficult if you aren't.

Technical skill is kind of a requirement if you want to achieve something that's technical by nature - such as website development or web hosting.

And hosting a font file entails dumping it next to your index.html file and adding some very basic CSS. Not exactly difficult.

And then EVERY site needs to serve the same font? The browser can no longer cache it across sites?

How is that relevant here?

Caching was never mentioned as being a requirement. I'm only giving the most basic solution for achieving compliance with regards to hosting a font file.

Scope creeping, on a Sunday no less... where are we headed

I don't think they can right now anyway since the cache is segrgated by origin to prevent leaking cache timings.

> And hosting a font file entails dumping it next to your index.html file and adding some very basic CSS. Not exactly difficult.

If you are a 60-year-old woodworker living in Appalachia trying to set up an online store to sell hand-carved flutes, this task is essentially impossible.

So they will have outsourced their website to some external entity that does possess the required technical knowledge. This required technical knowledge should include the ability to host a simple file.

So congratulations, you've regulated a middleman into the process. What a great day for humanity and a victory for regulatory capture.

The 60-year-old woodworker living in Appalachia will be relieved to know that browsers are able to display text in their online store without having to add any font files at all. If the 60-year-old woodworker living in Appalachia decides they absolutely must have a custom font on their website then self-hosting that font file is not any more impossible than adding the HTML/CSS required to fetch it from Google.

ianal, but I think CDNs would not be affected by the ruling, since they serve an important function. Google Fonts was deemed illegal here since it's not necessary and you can easily provide a font in a privacy-preserving way.

Google Fonts is a CDN. The *C*ontent they *D*eliver are fonts.

Not a lawyer as well but I'm not sure about this. Let's use the "jQuery served by a CDN" example here: You can easily argue that using jQuery is necessary for your site to function but there is no real benefit to the user by doing this with a CDN when you could just ship jQuery from your own server. AFAIK the benefit of CDNs is largely nullified nowadays by browsers using a different cache for each primary domain anyways, so you can't even really point out a potential benefit for the user (faster load times) here.

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