On our website we use Google Fonts. These are the "Google Fonts" of the company Google Inc. For the European area, the company Google Ireland Limited (Gordon House, Barrow Street Dublin 4, Ireland) is responsible for all Google services.

You do not have to log in or enter a password to use Google fonts. Furthermore, no cookies are stored in your browser. The files (CSS, fonts) are requested via the Google domains fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com. According to Google, the requests for CSS and fonts are completely separate from all other Google services. If you have a Google account, you don't need to worry that your Google account information, while using Google Fonts, will be transmitted to Google. Google records the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and the fonts used and stores this data securely. We'll look at exactly what the data storage looks like in more detail.

What are Google Fonts?

Google Fonts (formerly Google Web Fonts) is a directory of over 800 fonts that can be Google to its users free of charge.

Many of these fonts are released under the SIL Open Font License, while others are released under the Apache License. Both are free software licenses.

Why do we use Google Fonts on our website?

Google Fonts allows us to use fonts on our own website, but we don't have to upload them to our own server. Google Fonts is an important component to keep the quality of our website high. All Google Fonts are automatically optimized for the web and this saves data volume and is a big advantage especially for mobile use. When you visit our site, the low file size ensures a fast loading time. Furthermore, Google Fonts are secure web fonts. Different image synthesis systems (rendering) in different browsers, operating systems and mobile devices can lead to errors. Such errors can sometimes visually distort texts or entire web pages. Thanks to the fast Content Delivery Network (CDN), there are no cross-platform problems with Google Fonts. Google Fonts supports all major browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera) and works reliably on most modern mobile operating systems, including Android 2.2+ and iOS 4.2+ (iPhone, iPad, iPod). So, we use the Google Fonts so that we can display our entire online service as beautifully and consistently as possible.

What data is stored by Google?

When you visit our website, the fonts are reloaded via a Google server. Through this external call, data is transmitted to the Google servers. Thus, Google also recognizes that you or your IP address visit our website. The Google Fonts API was developed to reduce the use, storage and collection of end user data to what is necessary for the proper provision of fonts. By the way, API stands for "Application Programming Interface" and serves, among other things, as a data transmitter in the software sector.

Google Fonts stores CSS and font requests securely at Google and is therefore protected. Through the collected usage figures, Google can determine how well the individual fonts are received. Google publishes the results on internal analysis pages, such as Google Analytics. In addition, Google also uses data from its own web crawler to determine which websites are using Google Fonts. This data is published to the Google Fonts BigQuery database. Entrepreneurs and developers use the Google web service BigQuery to be able to examine and move large amounts of data.

However, it should be noted that each Google Font request also automatically transmits information such as language settings, IP address, browser version, browser screen resolution and browser name to the Google servers. Whether this data is also stored is not clearly ascertainable or is not clearly communicated by Google.

How long and where is the data stored?

Google stores requests for CSS assets for one day on its servers, which are mainly located outside the EU. This allows us to use fonts with the help of a Google stylesheet. A stylesheet is a format template that can be used to easily and quickly change the design or font of a web page, for example.

The font files are stored by Google for one year. Google thus pursues the goal of fundamentally improving the loading time of web pages. When millions of web pages refer to the same fonts, they are cached after the first visit and immediately reappear on all other web pages visited later. Sometimes Google updates font files to reduce file size, increase language coverage, and improve design.

How can I delete my data or prevent data storage?

The data that Google stores for one day or one year cannot simply be deleted. The data is automatically transmitted to Google when the page is called up. To be able to delete this data prematurely, you must contact Google support on https://support.google.com/?hl=de&tid=331593795279 contact. Data storage you prevent in this case only if you do not visit our site.

Unlike other web fonts, Google allows us unlimited access to all fonts. So we can have unlimited access to a sea of fonts and get the most out of our website. You can find out more about Google Fonts and other questions at https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?tid=331593795279. There, Google addresses privacy-related matters, but really detailed information about data storage is not included. It is relatively difficult to get really precise information about stored data from Google.

You can also find out what data is generally collected by Google and what this data is used for at https://www.google.com/intl/de/policies/privacy/ read up.

Source: Created with the Data protection generator by AdSimple in cooperation with warkly.com.