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Can someone provide insight into why Google is hosting fonts for free?

Anytime an advertisement company decides to do something for free, my cynicism goes on high alert. I am genuinely curious though - what's the business model? Are they collecting massive amounts of data while offering fonts?

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The reason I self-host fonts (that I paid for) on my personal website is that I don't want third party tracking via fonts on my website. It's all first party and I want to keep it that way. So there is your answer: It's an easy way to track websites via another vector other than Google Analytics, which many people block or which is not installed everywhere.

raphlinus had this to say in response to a similar question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370494

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