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 answers this question in their Google Fonts API docs.

To paraphrase the essential info:

"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."

"[...] 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."

"The font files themselves are cached for one year [...] When millions of websites all link to the same fonts, they are cached after visiting the first website and [the] result is that website visitors send very few requests to Google:"