Trackers are everywhere
In this part of the course, we will explain why trackers is a generic word and also that trackers can be found where you do not expect them to be. Let's start by an example, on the print screen shown below:
you think that you are only visiting the website named ronan-chardonneau.com but in reality you are also visiting two other websites:
- fonts.googleapis.com
- ajax.googleapis.com
and are letting 3 footprints on Google servers, those footprints are simply logs and are here to say that your browser downloaded those three files.
So Google is getting the following data: IP address, time of connection ... so to say with all the information it probably has about you, it knows who you are.
Though this font tracker is not 100% intrusive. In fact once the font is delivered and present within your cache then no extra data are recorded until the cache is cleared. So to say, it is intrusive but less than a pure analytics tracker.
Ok, how can I get rid of that? Well simply by self-hosting the font.
How to self-host Google fonts?
First download the font you need on https://fonts.google.com and then host them on your own server by adapting your existing CSS.