Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Is there a simple way to severly impede webscraping and LLM data collection of my website? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am working on a simple static website that gives visitors basic information about myself and the work I do. I want this as a way use to introduce myself to potential clients, collaborators, etc., rather than rely solely on LinkedIn as my visiting card.

This may seem sound rather oxymoronic given that I am literally going to be placing (some relevant) details about myself and my work on the internet, but I want to limit the websites' access from bots, web scraping and content collection for LLMs.

Is this a realistic expectation?

Also, any suggestions on privacy respecting, yet inexpensive domains that I can purchase in Europe would be of super great help.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Put each character in a spans with random classes, intersperse other random characters all over the place also with random classes, then make the unwanted characters hidden.

Bonus points if you use css to shuffle the order of letters too.

Accessibility? Pffffft.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

headless browser print to pdf, then extract the text from pdf, can automate getting around this easily. one way to harden things might be to use the canvas to draw text that is not selectable, but then OCR can easily defeat that too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Some websites I know actually do this - usually end up getting around it by using selectors to identify elements nested in a particular order, rather than using class names. Nowhere near as reliable though

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Yep, This is taken straight from Facebooks advertisements circa 2018, maybe still today.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That will break legitimate extensions

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I think that's such a small percentage of users that it doesn't really matter