Default theme "Innovation" loads font data from Google Fonts servers

[domaniko]

Default theme "Innovation" fetches one font file directly from Google Fonts servers.

There has been a court verdict in Germany that this breaks European data protection law. Some background here. Website owners now get letters from lawyers who claim compensation for violating data protection of their clients (here).

The licence of Google Fonts allows to store Google Font files on local server and add font files also to one's product: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq.

Best mitigation would be to load the Google font directly from GetSimple installation.

The required change is tiny, but requires one font file to be added to SimpleCMS. On interest I could provide a PR.

[webketje]

@domaniko thank you so much for bringing this to my attention, I was totally unaware that linking dynamically to a Google Font would breach EU GDPR.

[domaniko]

@tablatronix On interest please give me temporarily contributor rights.

The patch can be seen in domaniko@ee29a44

[domaniko]

@webketje

@domaniko thank you so much for bringing this to my attention, I was totally unaware that linking dynamically to a Google Font would breach EU GDPR.

Quite many people are very surprised about this harsh interpretation of data protection law by one rather local court. But general advise for the time being is to avoid direct reference to Google Font servers until this is settled,

[tablatronix]

You can pr anything there is no contributor status

[domaniko]

PR raised by #1355

[Torsten-K]

Actually, there is no need to use Google fonts at all. There are free fonts available on fontsquirrel.com for example, which are under the Apache license, like https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/open-sans, and which are allowed to distribute under certain circumstances.

[dimayakovlev]

No need to bloat standard theme with any additional fonts at all. It can look nice with using only native font stack.