The parent used wrong phrasing but it's real. The captchas don't become harder to solve but longer. If Google detects you're blocking trackers (or possibly cookies) it will throw at you an huge number of captchas until you give up. Imagine having to click like 12 panels of street lights, cars, bicycles, trucks, buses, etc. sometimes multiple times. This is getting out of control, really. I miss so much the Web 1.0 from 1999.

I use Firefox with all the privacy stuff turned on. I have to do multiple, difficult recaptchas all day. I've even missed out on Yosemite campsite reservations because of the delay from all the captchas presented to me when trying to book :(

By tracking you, they can remember that you are not a robot. As much as I dislike tracking, I don’t think having the captcha be always hard would be all that great either.

Ideally I’d like to see fewer captchas. But there’s no good alternative to it really. I mean, requiring phone verification instead is an alternative. But I don’t necessarily want to hand out my phone number to each and every site on the net that I interact with either.

That's the sad thing. We are getting to a point where software that would be used by malicious actors, is required by normal legitimate users because of how broken the web is.