Insights For Success

Strategy, Innovation, Leadership and Security

OCR

A font that will protect your private information from spies

technologyEdward Kiledjian

By now everyone is aware that companies and the government are spying on your every online transaction. They read your emails, instant messages and pretty much anything else you do online. Most of this analysis is done using automatic programs that rely on Optical Character recognition (OCR). OCR will detect what you are transmitting and will attempt to infer meaning. Companies do this to target advertising while governments do this for other reasons (insert you own justification).

There is a typeface called ZXX that aims to make this a little more challenging for these organizations. 

Why ZXX?

It may look funny but this is the Library of Congress (USA) code for content that has no linguistic content. 

Who created ZXX?

The fonts were created by a design specialist called Sang Mun who specifically designed each letter to evade or confuse OCR and text recognition programs while allowing a human to read the content with relative ease.

How does the ZXX typeface work?

Does this work?

It may be able to confuse some basic systems but I am 100% big organizations like Google and the NSA already have systems to easily interpret these fonts (by now). 

If you want real protection then look more towards encryption.