The GDPR prohibits the transfer of personal data to countries whose level of data protection is not equivalent to that of the EU. As the European Court of Justice determined in the last instance, the USA does not belong to countries with an equivalent level of data protection: The US laws to which Google as an American company is subject, allow authorities to access customer content on request without EU citizens having the option to defend themselves against such action at court.
Furthermore, it is undisputed that the IP address belongs to the personal data. So, if a website visitor's browser loads a font directly from Google's servers, his IP address ends up there.
The topic is highly up-to-date in Germany (and also in Austria): A district court in Munich has awarded a compensation to a website visitor because loading the fonts from Google had allegedly infringed on her personal rights. Even if the court's decision is unlikely to stand up in a higher instance, some lawyers have turned the court's decision into a business model: They systematically search the Internet for websites that load fonts directly from Google and send dissuasion with costs to the website operators, combined with the requirement to sign a cease-and-desist declaration. This causes great excitement among website operators. Many have paid despite the dubious legal situation, others have not. But most are looking for ways to deliver Google Fonts locally to avoid any legal issues.
Back to Joomla51: A very good description of the local delivery of the fonts can be found on the Joomla51 website under 'Tutorials'.
I make it even easier for myself by placing the CSS instructions for the fonts directly in my custom.css. Then, I only need to comment out or delete the last lines from 'foreach ...' in inc/fonts.php.
All this is simple, but has a few small pitfalls:
- After each update of the template you have to carry out the adjustment again.
- If you have several (or even many) websites with the same template from Joomla51, this degenerates into boring (and error-prone) hard work.
The second problem can be avoided by manipulating the .ZIP file before installing the new version of the template: Extract the inc/fonts.php file, make the adjustments in an editor, and put the changed file back into the .ZIP file copy.
However, things could become even simpler if Joomla51 included a switch in its templates 'Load Google Fonts from Google'. The corresponding tooltip should then contain two warnings like those:
- Setting this to Yes, does not comply with EU laws.
- Setting this to No, requires the webmaster to make sure that the fonts are available locally.
Ciaran, what's your statement?
