I'm a bit confused when I read that information is sent in plain text over the internet. I thought all data was sent as binary data-- e.g. a webserver like Django returns bytes, not strings. What am I missing?
What you're missing is that "plain text" is just a series of bytes. In general terms bytes are "binary data" but a subset of binary data is "ASCII-encoded human readable text" which is what we refer to as plain-text.
IP itself has some framing, headers, flags and what have you, that's not plain-text, but the payload of a TCP/IP packet for a plain-text protocol like SMTP or HTTP is easy to read.
You can always use a tool like tcpdump or Wireshark to dump out packets and see what's inside. There's many examples of how this plays out where the binary data looks like this:
0x0000: 4520 0054 882b 0000 3001 7cf5 45fe d52b E..T.+..0.|.E..+
0x0010: 4815 222a 0800 3530 272a 0000 25ff d744 H."..50'..%..D
0x0020: ae5e 0500 0809 0a0b 0c0d 0e0f 1011 1213 .^..............
0x0030: 1415 1617 1819 1a1b 1c1d 1e1f 2021 2223 .............!"#
0x0040: 2425 2627 2829 2a2b 2c2d 2e2f 3031 3233 $%&'()*+,-./0123
0x0050: 3435 3637 4567
In the middle is the hex representation of the data. On the right is the plain-text expression of same. You can see at the end it's just ASCII data even if the earlier bits look like garbage.
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