How does this not reduce to hitting any server not owned by you is leaking your IP address?
If I host my website behind Google Cloud CDN they have logs of the visitors IP. If I host my site on S3 they log the IP.
Does this mean that a visitor must insteract only with services that I own until I can get concent to use "unnecessary" third party services?
I think it is pretty significant if "necessary" is reduced to "could have don't it without". Because sure I could avoid Google Fonts, but now I need to do splitting and per-browser detection myself. Ok sure, browser font support is pretty consistent these days and I know my site just uses English and emoji in some pages. But now I can't throw that site in cloud storage. I also can't use a VPS because there are traffic logs. So I buy a server in a datacenter. But what if they have some form of traffic logs? I guess my question is where does this definition of "unnecessary" stop.
The core issue with the linked situations is that the US Cloud Act applies, which means that US governmental agencies can request access to i.e. traffic logs, without a court order for mass surveillance.
Well, I'd say so yes. It's the same thing that came up when hotlinking was first a major thing[0]. In my opinion, anything but communication with the first party violates expectations. If I visit Imgur, then I expect to deal with Imgur, and not with their myriad of third parties all doing something else that's not directly my business.
People of course don't mind, reality is often like this too.
Does this ruling distinguish between “does” and “could”, though? Because any CDN could spy if they wanted. Google fonts has a pretty reasonable privacy policy[1]. I don’t read German, so I wonder if there’s nuance here that I’m missing (like, did they find that Google actually was misusing the data?)
Google is a US company and the US government can and do ask companies to provide any data on the servers even if it is against the policy Google has written in that document.
Google is an advertising network, they don't need to sell the IP to make money.
It's on the original website to prove that they only use your data for what you asked them to, if you want to do anything else, you need to request informed consent.
Using hosted Google fonts is not needed to run the website (as you can also easily embed them without having the user touch Google). And Google will not say they won't do anything with that data, as they would be lying since that's the whole reason google fonts and other free webdev resources by Google exists: to gather as much data about the user it can.
What if my origin server is behind Google Cloud CDN anyways? I mean it is possible for me to run my own datacenter with a direct connection to the users IP but that is obviously unreasonable. As soon as I outsource anything it can now see the users IP.
I guess this particular case seems somewhat reasonable, but where is the line.
Also note that Google Fonts is a lot more that just hosting a download. It has different font files for different browsers for max compatibility as well as font splitting so that you aren't downloading too many glyphs and weights that you don't need for this page. Reimplementing Google Fonts isn't trivial.
It unquestionably leaks information, and it is why projects like Decentraleyes exist.
Whether it is "unnecessary" is the interesting question. For fonts, it's really hard to claim that you couldn't have created the website without Google's fonts CDN.
Yes, it would. Actually so many uses of CDN's are nonsensical. I mean, I literally block those requests and sites just work OK. (For my definition of OK. If I don't see autoloading autoplaying video it's only a big big plus)
My reading is that nothing in the argument depends on the exact resource in question being a font, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t generalise to other resources.
> Google Fonts kann durch die Beklagte auch genutzt werden, ohne dass beim Aufruf der Webseite eine Verbindung zu einem Google-Server hergestellt wird und eine Übertragung der IP-Adresse der Webseitennutzer an Google stattfindet.
translated:
> Google fonts can be used by the defendant in a different way, so that a connection to the website does not make a connection to the Google server, thus without transmitting the IP address of the website visitor to Google.
What if I host my website on Google Cloud Platform? I guess it should be OK then to use Google Fonts CDN on the website, because it's the same entity, and visitor's IP was already leaked to Google when the HTML page was served. Can't really ask user for consent before loading the HTML page!
Does it mean Google, AWS, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Akamai, and everybody else (except Hetzner) are now outlawed in Germany? Because, as I said, I cannot ask for consent before serving the initial HTML, unless someone develops a magical IP-less protocol for delivering consent. I'm not sure if even Hetzner server is OK, it's still a third party even if Germany-based.
There is a technical necessity for your hosting provider to see the user's IP.
The GDPR does not require consent for passing on private information when there is a technical or legal necessity, as well as a number of other preconditions.
Using a CDN service operated by a non-GDPR business such as Cloudflare, Google, Amazon, or Akamai could potentially be confirmed to be a violation of GDPR, yes, if the CDN-hosted resources are used without opt-in. I’m eagerly awaiting the first complaint on these grounds to be reviewed and judged, now that the GDPR treaty with the United States has lapsed. It doesn’t matter where the CDN’s servers are; without the US having signed a treaty into law, each of their businesses are subject to compulsion by various US authorities to dishonor their commitments to the GDPR.
It looks like the court decided SCCs were not sufficient as Cloudflare is subject to US surveillance laws so they wouldn't be able to provide adequate guarantees.
It’s not a question of what is necessary. It’s a question of transparency and consent. You must gain consent for giving Google personal data for tracking purposes.
ELI5: Why does the EU not just prevent Google from using personal data they receive by law in any way they see fit? Would that not be a lot more effective than requiring the millions of small businesses and small web devs to figure it out on their end?
That's the main revenue stream of Google it would pretty much mean Google itself would be forbidden.
The EU gives companies the option and only requires all this hoopla if you want to use the data for something else than the user requested. The "problem" is that Google does want that, as they are an advertising network, so they give web developers access to their tools but tell you that you have to ask the user for consent. That everyone totally forgets those warnings and somehow forgets that Google is an advertising network is on them, just like it is your responsibility what are random dependencies you download using whatever dependency tool you use.
I was not arguing the sanity of the policy. I was merely correcting GP’s interpretation of the ruling. Better for the millions of small businesses to only have to post a list of sub-processors than to have to determine what would be “necessary” in the eyes of the law.
