Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts

Re:Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse... by whoopdedo on Thursday July 09, 2020 @06:15AM (#23778621)

My idea, a browser extension that downloads a mirror of the most popular fonts and intercepts requests to google inserting device local CSS instead. Might not be desirable for mobile devices, but with ample storage you get faster page loading and no telemetry sent to anyone.

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Re:Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse... by WorldMaker on Thursday July 09, 2020 @04:15PM (#23784628)

All browser font systems already prefer locally installed fonts to CSS @font-face lookups.

The tool SkyFonts (from Monotype foundry and recommended by stores like MyFonts.com) as one of several features as a "cloud font updater" includes a "download the top X Google Fonts" option. It's an easy way to get a faster page load experience on the web.

The problem to watch out for, and it is why it's not generally recommended, is that font loading times are already in the wild a privacy issue (there are fingerprinting tools out there that try to download fonts and draw them in an off-screen CANVAS, using "too fast" as a deanonymization vector).

The best bet to generally help the web at large would be a browser or OS vendor to start installing the Top X fonts from Google Fonts out of the box.

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Re:Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse... by mada360 on Thursday July 09, 2020 @06:28AM (#23778685)

That sound exactly like what decentraleyes does https://decentraleyes.org/

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Re:Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse... by gruez on Thursday July 09, 2020 @08:32AM (#23779464)

AFAIK it only caches js files, not fonts.

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