German Court Fines Website Owner for Violating the GDPR by Using Google-Hosted Fonts
In late January, a Munich regional court ruled that a plaintiff was entitled to injunctive relief and damages of 100 € from an undisclosed website owner for passing on the visitor’s IP address to Google through the use of Google Fonts. Since it is possible to use the fonts without connecting to Google, the court deemed this a violation of Europe’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) because Google Fonts exposes the visitor’s IP address: The defendant violated the plaintiff’s right to informational self-determination by forwarding the dynamic IP address to Google when the plaintiff accessed the defendant’s website.7The automatic transmission of the IP address by the defendant to Google was an inadmissible encroachment on the plaintiff’s general personality rights under data protection law, since the plaintiff in this encroachment was undisputedly not in accordance with Section 13 (2) TMG old version, Art. 6 (1) a ) GDPR has consented. Google Fonts FAQ discloses the data collection under a section about user privacy and states that it caches responses to minimize requests and serve the fonts faster. It does not specify exactly what data is collected but seems to imply that the information it collects is necessary to serve the fonts: The Google…
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