We tend not to think about fonts very much—we use Arial, Verdana, Georgia, and Helvetica all the time and never notice them. That's why Amnesty International's new font, which they say will promote conversations about Internet privacy, is so interesting. Will it get people talking? And can it actually make you safer online?

Meet Mutant Font

Amnesty's new idea is called Mutant Font. Using Mutant Font is simple: just go to the website (www.mutantfont.com/en) and enter the text you want to keep secret from prying eyes. Click "Generate Font," copy the code, and paste it into your blog. The text is readable by humans, but poses difficulties for machines.

There are two ways that Mutant Font makes it harder for monitoring and censoring bots: the optical part that's displayed on your screen, and the code that sits behind it. Both can be monitored, and the font has solutions for both. Let's take a look at the displayed part first.

https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/7251228/type/dlg/sid/UUmuoUeUpU53229/https://vimeo.com/123199639

There are seven different variations of the font, each of which have "graphical interventions" added; for example, "Mutant Wavy" shows wavy lines behind each letter, "Mutant Fast" has horizontal lines projecting to the left from each letter, and "Mutant Square" displays a number of differently sized squares around each letter. These interventions are designed to prevent optical character recognition from picking up the letters and words that you've posted without making them too hard for people to read. The font displayed on your website changes every 24 hours, hypothetically making it difficult for machines to learn to read what you've written.

The code that represents the font changes every also 24 hours, making it even harder for machines to pick up on what's being discussed on a particular web page. The informational video put out by Amnesty, above, says that there are thousands of codes, but it's easy to imagine that number growing to tens or hundreds of thousands very quickly, making it difficult for machines to pick out patterns.

Between changing every 24 hours, using a special set of code, and using a number of graphical interventions, Mutant Font was created with Internet privacy in mind. Want to see what it looks here? Here's a block of text in Mutant Font:

mutant-font-example

Mutant Font works on WordPress and most other content-publishing platforms, as well as sites using the http and https protocols. The code that you get from the Mutant Font website looks like this:

        <p class="fonte_mutante_8">
 Ù2 8_4 !Y\ 2((E 3.( ,1Y–./!Y? /\3(15(\3/_\2 @Y;( 3./2 3(73 .Y1#(1 3_ 1(Y#F Ù\# 3.( )Y!3 3.Y3 /3 !.Y\,(2 _\ Y 1(,4?Y1 ZY2/2 2(15(2 3_ !_\)42( Z_32 3.Y3 Y1( 318/\, 3_ 1(Y# 6.Y3 8_4'5( 61/33(\F

 


 <a href="[URL]" target="_blank"><img src="[IMAGE URL]" class="img-hd"></a>
</p>

It also includes a block of CSS that you'll need to add to your page to get the text to display correctly.

        

@font-face {
font-family: 'Fonte_Mutante_8';
font-style: normal;
src: url('https://fontemutante.com.br/uploads/font_mutante/file/8/Mutante_ondulada_fina_mix.ttf') format('truetype');}
.fonte_mutante_8 {
font-family: Fonte_Mutante_8;
font-size:16px;
letter-spacing: 1px;}

Does It Work?

Because Mutant Font is still new, I wasn't able to find any tests of whether or not it holds up against any actual surveillance software. It's a good bet that the NSA, GCHQ, Chinese intelligence, and other similar agencies are using data-scraping technologies to get alerts when specific trigger words or phrases are used online (especially for people who read about security), but how effectively Mutant Font prevents this is yet to be seen.

Amnesty International hasn't made any claims on the actual effectiveness of this font, and describes it primarily as a way to start conversations and spread awareness about Internet privacy issuesIt might do that . . . but it seems pretty likely that it won't do much else.

I reached out to Amnesty International to ask them about any security-related research they've done with the font, and haven't heard back yet. However, an email thread on privacy at W3C suggests that it doesn't really have much security value at all. Which is probably true; the substitutions that it makes are quite simple.

amnesty-freedom-expression

And while the graphical interventions might make it harder for consumer-level optical character recognition to figure out what's being written, I doubt it would get past government-level software.

Still, I'm hopeful that Mutant Font gets some people talking about what they need to do to stay safe online. A discussion about VPNs, Tor, and privacy on social networks would be better, but we have to start somewhere.

What do you think about Mutant Font? Would you consider using it on your blog to draw attention to the fight for online privacy? Or is it a total gimmick? Share your thoughts below!