It's a start. reCAPTCHA is a notorious pain in the arse for anyone whose browser isn't Chrome and for anyone who doesn't keep cookies. I'm not sure if hCaptcha will be better, but it's hard to imagine it being any worse.
The pattern seems to be 2/3 'right' guesses. on sites like eBay, the captcha is broke on firefox. I complete it, and it says "you need to resubmit this form again", and reloads the entire page.
That's the cost of privacy; broken pages and refused access because Google says "NO!".
And businesses are okay with Google denying them money. I wonder if they did a cost/ben analysis if they find it worthwhile.
Thanks to Google, I've actually saved quite a bit of money, they lost out hundreds recently when their automated systems decided to refuse my transaction. Their loss and my gain.
(Disclaimer, I work at msft. Nowhere near this though).
If they are negotiating with other providers, they certainly aren’t doing a very good job of it.
Make sure they know. I write to sites and tell them they just lost a customer because Google doesn't give a shit. I've gotten replies from smaller outfits that had no idea what was going on.
I frequently run into the same issue of having correct answers rejected, and have read posts from many others who experience the same. At some point I started intentionally picking random squares for the first couple image sets. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to end up taking any more submissions overall than when I try to pick the right answers from the start.
Plus, polluting Google's free work data set ever so slightly gives me a small amount of pleasure.
Browsing an "I'm under attack"-mode website behind Cloudflare has been super annoying for me since last week. To the point that I usually close the page when I see a HCAPTCHA. Their visual challenge is harder to navigate than reCAPTCHA, and because this is their business model I suspect they have incentive to make it easier.
- Ad blocking extension not installed or rules too lax - Script blocking not enabled - no VPN used - stores tracking Cookies
If all of those do not apply to you, I would feel discriminated against by Google, even more so, than usual.
1. I do have an ad blocker installed, but it's not very aggressive.
2. All scripts are enabled. I already have trouble with some sites due to my fairly lax ad blocker.
3. I do not use a VPN (since it just transfers who is able to see my traffic from one party to another). Additionally, virtually every service provider penalizes VPN IPs to the point where it's probably not worth the hassle.
4. Not sure what you mean by "stores tracking Cookies".
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> If all of those do not apply to you, I would feel discriminated against by Google
I do not agree with that (mostly because of point 3). The reality is that VPN traffic is significantly more "spammy"/bot-filled than non-VPN traffic. It's a perfectly rational and justifiable way to protect sites (albeit ReCAPTCHA is of dubious effectiveness).
Doing all of the stated things these days has become a minimum for protecting your privacy online. The current situation is a quite bad for privacy conscious people. Even if we only trust first party scripts and do not allow them being loaded from a subdomain, which actually has all the third party scripts again, we still face issues, for example fingerprinting.
I can only laud websites, which can be used completely without third party scripts or perhaps even without scripts at all, making sure it all works with REST, offering alternatives, when scripts are blocked.
It's good to see some "competition" in this area, even, if I do not trust cloudflare either. More competition means less Google monopoly. Hopefully in the long run it will lead to better solutions for casual users.
Not to wax cynical, this seems like it might not encourage better behavior in every possible scenario.
reCaptcha is wildly sophisticated under the hood[1]. I use it on all three major browsers and find the number of challenges varies from 0 to 4: sometimes it says I'm verified without doing anything, other times I need to go through 4 screens.
I would love to see someone put some numbers behind this claim, because I think it is false.
[1] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-16/materials/asia-16-Siva...
EDIT: Are you downvoting because you don't like reCaptcha, or because you can't (or won't) set up an experiment to demonstrate this claim and prefer to just jump on the bandwagon?
That is my repeatable experience as the end user.
I get why Firefox won’t sue Google. I wish end users would.