[Hizonner]

> there needs to be some distinction between actually legitimate "necessary for functioning" data processing which would include stuff such as Google Fonts

Downloaded fonts are not "necessary for functioning". Just use the system fonts.

Essentially no actual user cares AT ALL about the fonts on your Web site. If you're wasting time and energy on stuff like fonts, all you're doing is frustrating users by not putting that time and energy into anything actually valuable... while wasting every user's bandwidth.

Anyway, you have no control over what Google does with that IP address (or any associated cookies), and likely no reliable assurance that what Google does with the information is "necessary for functioning". I would expect Google to tie that download to every other download from that user's browser on every other site, and use the results for every possible purpose. If by some miracle Google doesn't do that, lots of the other third-party crap that sites embed will. Often the third party providers' descriptions of how their stuff work will be missing, incomplete, unintentionally wrong, intentionally misleading, or outright lies, so to have any real assurance you'd need to do some serious due diligence on every third party embed. Which nobody does, and which would defeat the "easy use" advantage of using those embeds to begin with.

Nearly all Web pages could load without a single connection to any server other than the one in the page URL. It's completely appropriate to treat every such connection as a disclosure of information to a third party... with all the regulatory requirements that should come with that... regardless of whether or not you've gotten used to making those connections without thinking about them. If it takes big fines to enforce that, well, I guess that's tough.

[EmilyHughes]

But it's the job of the government to enforce that via warnings and fines, not private entities sueing for "emotional damage".

The IP alone is almost useless anyway unless it can be tied to other information you've given up to google already - in which case you can't tell you are that cautious with your browsing to begin with.

[hakfoo]

Couldn't at least "icon fonts" like FontAwesome be necessary for meaningful functionality of some sites?

A site that's sprinkled with [FE30] placeholders where the designers expected icons isn't necessarily readable or usable.