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But nothing requires you to link directly to the font on their CDN. The sources, the whole build pipeline, everything is available and you can host it all by yourself.

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.

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Pure speculation, but I would guess the vast majority of people do NOT self-host. I use their CDN as it's faster and much easier to set up, just link in your CSS or whatever.

The SIL Open Font License restricts subsetting, so you do need to be careful when doing this (the license requires that you change the font name if you reduce the font's display quality). Google has gotten waivers to allow them to alter the fonts without changing their names.

The repository with the fonts and tools is here: https://github.com/google/fonts

Only fonts with “reserved name” clause have such restriction, and then you are only required to rename the modified font.

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