Displaying Contact Information
What all beginners should know before leaving their contact information in a doodle, video production, website, image or anything else publicly available.
What is OCR?
Optical Character Recognition. This is the ability for a computer to recognize letters or text within an image and convert that to a editable and usable format. This is most common utilized in scanners and bots to turn image text into usable text to answer questions automatically.
What is a screenshot?
A picture of the entire screen copied to a hidden clipboard or saved to an area on a computer.
What is a bot?
A software program designed for different automatic purposes.
Can a bot use OCR, take screenshots or read a video?
Yes, a bot can do all of those. Microsoft developed the Video Indexer which allows an bot to read a variety of videos and extract useable text from those videos using a combination of screenshots and OCR technology at a rapid rate.
Text Recognition for Video in Microsoft Video Indexer
Is it safe to put my email in a video?
No it is not. OCR Email Harvesters will grab your email and add it to their database. Your email will be sold of hundreds of millions of times for years to come and it will never stop getting sold. Once you are on a spammer or or viral infected list, you can never get off of that list no matter how many times you click the unsubscribe button. The unsubscribe just tells them you are a real person.
What is an email harvester?
These are bots designed for one purpose; going from webpage to webpage, scouring the Internet looking for email addresses that are either in plain text, obfuscated, in an image or inside a video. When found, they are added to a database and then sold over and over again. There is no stopping or preventing this from happening.
Should I put any information in my doodles?
Never put any personally identifiable information that would allow your direct house or location to be known inside a video production, email or other form of non-encrypted communication. Business information only should go on non-encrypted communications. Whatever business information is already publicly available is okay to put into a doodle, website, video production, image or some other form of public communication. The business address, business phone number or the URL for an email form with hacker and spam protection on it would be examples of what can be displayed.
