Well, they can track people across sites that use Google Fonts, so maybe having a larger set of characters and encouraging more use gives them a farther tracking reach.
What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users?
The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts efficiently.
Use of Google Fonts is unauthenticated. No cookies are sent by website visitors to the Google Fonts API. Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail.
In order to serve fonts quickly and efficiently with the fewest requests, responses are cached by the browser to minimize round-trips to our servers.
>For the lazy, a snippet indicating that no such tracking occurs: Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail.
That's not what the snippet says. It is a technical statement, not a privacy statement. It doesn't mean they can't track you, it means it's a tiny bit harder to track you. Nothing in there says "we don't cross-reference these data" or "these data aren't used for tracking purposes" or anything else. Just that your Google account information isn't sent to the font servers.
More relevantly, the Google Fonts privacy policy links to the general Google privacy policy, which doesn't have any special "if you're using Google Fonts we collect a whole lot less than this" subsection. They might be using the data. They might not be. They might not be using the data today but decide to start using it tomorrow.
The font they created has nothing to do with tracking you, it just so happens that if hosted on Google Fonts they can also do that. But that's a feature of Google Fonts, not Noto.
The repository with the fonts and tools is here: https://github.com/google/fonts
Even if this was remotely close to their goal, it still doesn't make sense. They already have Google Analytics on basically every website in existence. Investing millions of dollars in an extremely robust font to increase web tracking by 0.0000000001% seems like a terrible investment.
a) What should we do next? Our cash is burning! Well, lets use countless human hours to make a beautiful font to make the world a better place!
b) How can we reach to more traffic that might be currently not visible to us? Well, maybe we should design a really beautiful font that everyone likes and host it in our server? Sounds like a plan, lets do it!
c) We're making products supporting an unprecedented amount of locales and there's no font family out that that covers them all and still looks consistent, we're going to have to make it ourselves. Hey, if we open it up then there will be even more international content out there to put AdSense on!