google web fonts is one small way the adtech behemoth uses its monopoly powered network effect to surveil people across the internet.
I was guilty of using it out of convenience on my old vanity website and stagnant blog, but last night I spent a little time excising it (see https://lab.burn.capital/chaz/chazomatic.us and https://lab.burn.capital/chaz/blog.chazomatic.us).
For anyone else looking to reduce google's stranglehold on the internet in this small way, I found some nice google web fonts alternatives:
https://fontlibrary.org/ has a small but decent library of free fonts, and they deliver the css similarly to how google does, so you can use it without offering the fonts for download yourself.
https://fontcdn.toolforge.org/ is a service that proxies google web fonts while preserving your privacy, so you can use it as a direct drop-in replacement.
Or maybe I'm just confused. If you access it via the https://fontcdn.toolforge.org/ URL, it seems to provide a non-google URL for you to use on your website, which would mean it *is* proxying from google, a good thing.
It's also available via the author's website, which just gives you google URLs. Dunno!
I'm going to stop tooting about it now before I confuse myself even more 😔
Ha, I should have looked closer at fontcdn before tooting! Turns out they don't proxy anything, they're just a search interface for google web fonts. Use fontlibrary.org instead!