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The big picture: Putting your writing on the open web used to mean people could read it. Now, it also means dozens of crawlers can copy it into training datasets. Sure, anti-scraping tools such as robots.txt exist, but they only work if the bots themselves agree to stay away, which doesn't always happen. Stricter measures were clearly needed, and now they have arrived in an innovative new form.
A Brazilian creative studio called Seneda & Abrucio has teamed up with Playtype, a Copenhagen-based type foundry, to build something that doesn't rely on asking nicely to keep crawlers away. They call it ShieldFont, and it's essentially a free, open-source web font with a twist. It works by showing you one sentence while presenting an AI scraper with a completely different one.
The thing is, you see rendered pixels on a screen. Most mass scrapers, on the other hand, simply grab the raw HTML underneath. ShieldFont exploits this difference through an automated process called OpenType glyph substitution. This technology is normally used to replace one or more typed characters with alternate glyphs that improve how text is rendered. In this case, however, entire words are swapped out, meaning a scraper can pick up only gibberish from the webpage.
