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Comment by gcb0 | Hacker News Reader

not to mention when google puts you in captcha-hell-ban.

often, after a few difficult ones, I realize I get stuck into the same 20 challenges. over and over. no matter if I get them rigth or not. We do run all browser in the office with figerprint protection on and run non-exit-tor-nodes in all offices. But those are hardly excuses.

The hell bans happens more often on firefox for android, but I guess that is what you can expect when you go against goliath.

It's literally google censoring me from talking (and sometimes reading) random sites on the web

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And it's going to get worse if this whole "privacy" thing catches on. Google is an advertising company which does adtech, and adtech is inherently about tracking and profiling people. Anyone who messes with that is actively costing Google money, and Google will... you know... stop them from doing that, whether subtly or overtly. There's nothing else they can really do, and "congressional hearings" and "calls for reform" won't change that fundamental fact.

I've had this happen frequently because my configuration really aggressively blocks this stuff. It's bad enough that I have a separate browser (Gnome Web aka Epiphany) just for logging into and using sites that have Captcha, like Pocket and Bandcamp, and I do everything else in Firefox. Captcha is horrible. I understand why sites use it, but putting a Google-wall in front of your content is a very bad idea.

The problem is not the wall itself, but that Google uses it’s de-facto monopoly position to enforce tracking.

Plus creating image recognition training data for them. I am not interested in working for Google. Not paid, let alone for free.

Never thought about it from that perspective before

I have fingerprinting off too in firefox, and a lot times I now just ignore sites using captcha.

No, it’s the site owner choosing to outsource their decisions about gatekeeping a private site to Google. Google isn’t censoring you via CAPTCHA, the site owner is.

Lol sure, and “guns don’t kill people; people kill people”

That is only true as far as the site owner knows of and understands the consequences of their actions. I would be extremely surprised if more than 10% of their users understand this. Whether they care is a whole other matter, but this is very likely ignorance rather than malice on the part of site owners.

I can understand why site owners resort to such services. They need a a strong CAPTCHA system. The problem is really Google for abusing it.

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