TECHNICAL GLOSSARY · STANDARDS DEFINITION · VERIFIED 2026-11-10
Zero-Width Characters
Authoritative Definition
Invisible Unicode characters—such as Zero-Width Space (U+200B) and Zero-Width Joiner (U+200D)—that render with zero width on screen but can be embedded into text to create tracking watermarks.
Common Aliases:Zero-Width SpaceInvisible UnicodeSteganographic Watermarking
## Invisible Fingerprinting in Copied Text
Zero-width characters occupy valid codepoints in the Unicode standard but take up zero pixels when displayed.
Certain platforms encode binary user IDs into copied text using permutations of zero-width characters (e.g. U+200B for 0, U+200C for 1) to track who copied internal documents. PrivacyFold's Clean Paste scrubber identifies and purges all zero-width markers automatically.
Related Client-Side Privacy Tools
Run the in-browser implementations adhering to Zero-Width Characters with zero server uploads.