Protect a page from email collectors

Question

I'm creating a page where a customer can edit their order before they pay for it. The page will delete as soon as the order is paid for, but what's the best way to protect against email/phone number collecting bots? It needs to contain the email address and/or phone number. There is no way around that. (Shipping address also.)

Although the page will expire within minutes in most cases, I still want a customer to be safe if they choose to place an order now and pay for it several months later. (The nature of my business is that knowing what you would like to order may take a bit of effort and research, which a customer would not want to repeat if they decide to delay their order until they can afford to pay for it.)

Also, the site currently has no log on system. I will develop one eventually, but even once I do, I always want anonymous purchasing to be an option. A customer should be able to edit their order at any time from the link emailed to them without creating a username/password.

Before I had this concern, I was going to have it be www.domainexample.com?id=7, but any bot could check id=6 and id=5 to see if they've been shipped yet, and id=8 to see if there is a new order yet.

How can I provide a similar level of protection against email address theft that larger more professional sites like eBay would offer? (If that's even possible with anonymous purchasing. I hope it is.)

Anyone offering language-specific advice, I am coding in php/javascript/html. Though I'm sure I can look up the php equivalent of any suggestions offered.

Edit:

Important detail I forgot to mention. The target audience is old ladies that can barely use a computer at all. Any security feature that impacts the user experience could cost hundreds of dollars in missed sales as the website becomes too intimidating to use.

Answer 1

Before I had this concern, I was going to have it be www.domainexample.com?id=7, but any bot could check id=6 and id=5 to see if they've been shipped yet, and id=8 to see if there is a new order yet.

Generate a long, random ID. If you for instance generate a version 4 UUID it'll be unique and not guessable. Anyone with the URL can access it, but it's infeasible to guess the link.

The UUID is essentially the authentication in this case.

Answer 2

Also, the site currently has no log on system. I will develop one eventually, but even once I do, I always want anonymous purchasing to be an option. A customer should be able to edit their order at any time from the link emailed to them without creating a username/password.

You can implement something like OTP technique (one-time password). For instance you add a session specific parameters to the link you send to the user. Each time the client uses the link to access the page the system generates the same link but with different session param values for the next access. Third parties including bots will not be able to reach anonymous purchase data.
The parameters values in the link must be random and unique for each session.

Before I had this concern, I was going to have it be www.domainexample.com?id=7, but any bot could check id=6 and id=5 to see if they've been shipped yet, and id=8 to see if there is a new order yet.

In this case you may consider two levels of protection :

• On the first level your system should prevent bots from accessing the web page, this can be implemented by presenting a challenge, something like Captcha.
• On the second level, make impossible for bots to collect sensitives content like emails that are displayed in raw strings (selectable using cursor), this can be done by displaying strings in form of images. There are already a couple of libraries for this matter php display string into image.