Sacrificing accessibility for not getting web scraped

Sacrificing accessibility for not getting web scraped
tilschuenemann.de

Although... Hmm! I just pasted it into Claude and got:

When text content gets scraped from the web, and used for ever-increasing training data to improve. Copyright laws get broken, content gets addressively scraped, and even though you might have deleted your original work, it might must show up because it got cached or archived at some point. Now, if you subscribe to the idea that your content shouldn't be used for training, you don't have much say. I wondered how I personally would mitigate this on a technical level. et tu, caesar? In my linear algebra class we discussed the caesar cipher[1] as a simple encryption algorithm: Every character gets shifted by n characters. If you know (or guess) the shift, you can figure out the original text. Brute force or character heuristics break this easily. But we can apply this substitution more generally to a font! A font contains a cmap (character map), which maps codepoints and glyphs. A codepoint defines the character, or complex symbol, and the glyph represents the visual shape. We scramble the font's codepoint-glyph-mapping, and adjust the text with the inverse of the scramble, so it stays intact for our readers. It displays correctly, but the inspected (or scraped) HTML stays scrambled. Theoretically, you could apply a different scramble to each request. This works as long as scrapers don't use OCR for handling edge cases like this, but I don't think it would be feasible. I also tested if ChatGPT could decode a ciphertext if I'd tell it that a substitution cipher was used, and after some back and forth, it gave me the result: "One day Alice went down a rabbit hole,

How accurate is this?

Did you seriously just make things worse for screen reader users and not even ... verify ... it worked to make things worse for AI?

Part of the reason it might be useful is not because “no AI can ever read it” (because I’m sure a pentesting-focused Claude Code could get past almost any similar obfuscation), but rather that the completely automated and dumb scrapers stealing your content for the training of the AI models can’t read it. For many systems, that’s more than enough.

That said, I recently completely tore apart my website and rebuilt it from the ground up because I wasn’t happy with how inaccessible it was. For many like me, sacrificing accessibility is not just a bad look, but plainly unacceptable.