My fight against CDN libraries

A very nice writeup and awesome work by David Revoy of the Pepper & Carrot webcomic:

A CDN ( acronym for Content Delivery Network ) library is often a single line of code proposed "generously" by an external service to let you link and embed a complex features, the easy way. A common example is Google Web Fonts:

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lobster" rel="stylesheet">

Paste this line in the header of your website and 'tadaaa!', you can use the font 'Lobster' to decorate all your texts. Easy, quick, efficient and fast to load. Merci Google. So, what's the problem?

Well a big one: Privacy of the readers of Pepper&Carrot. In our example, users of Google Web Fonts are bound by Google's privacy policy. It allows Google to collect a large amount of data about readers: log data (e.g. browser version), location data (the IP address of your site's visitors) and more because they can track your path or history threw all the website using their other networks of CDN.

... And I didn't had a CDN only for Google Web Font. I had also a CDN for Addthis (easy social-networks buttons), Gravatar (easy avatars), Font-awesome (easy icons), etc... As many, many website around!

Read the full post at his blog!

#privacy #web #openculture #comics
My fight against CDN libraries

Official homepage of Pepper&Carrot, a free/libre and open-source webcomic about Pepper, a young witch and her cat, Carrot. They live in a fantasy universe of potions, magic, and creatures.