Can Google track me if I use Google Web Fonts?

Question

By using Google Web Fonts can/does Google

• process the text of the webpage (despite disallowed by robots.txt)
• track the visitors of the webpage, and (theor

Answer 1

Google can for sure count your users and track their IP address, browser version, and such. It won't be able to access user cookies as the font resides on a different domain.

By using a web font you are not sharing any content with the font provider, but your users may be providing a referrer address to the provider (the URL of the page containing the font request, i.e. using the font). If your page is public and does not require authentication, nothing prevents Google from reading this referrer, except best practices. If it requires authentication, then Google should not be able to get the text.