ReCAPTCHA (A Google Service) Privacy Concerns | Hacker News Reader

ReCAPTCHA (A Google Service) Privacy Concerns

blog.cloudflare.com

12 pointsAutoDisorder11 comments

Heh, hCaptcha is the only thing I dread and hate more than ReCAPTCHA. It pretty much always triggers and it always wants me to find something very american, like US school busses on images where it's not really clear what they actually expect of me.

These services that use us as free workforce need to go away.

Every captcha I've encountered thus far has been pretty Americentric, and almost by definition, discriminatory against non-Americans[1].

Doubly so against non-Americans with disabilities.

Captcha makers really need to A/B test their product across a wider global sample of people, before they deploy.

On hcaptcha being worse, for those of us using Tor Browser, hcaptcha is significantly less painful than recaptcha - https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=25227431

[1] - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/11/captchas-dont-prove-youre-h...

hCaptcha is in fact tested this way, and has pretty consistent accuracy across hundreds of countries:

https://www.hcaptcha.com/post/do-captchas-really-discriminat...

(disclosure: work there)

Funny title as I have privacy concerns when it comes to cloudflare/hCaptcha as well.

What do people use these days as an open source (self hosted) alternative to recaptcha/hCaptcha that is accessible for people with disabilities?

Seems like FriendlyCaptcha [0] might tick the boxes. Here's the author talking about it [1].

[0]: https://friendlycaptcha.com/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24921288

FriendlyCaptcha is not even a captcha. It's just a client side rate limiter.

hCaptcha really doesn't care who you are, and has no incentive to do so. Pretty different economic model than an ad seller like Google.

People who build their own generally end up switching to a service like hCaptcha once they start getting attacked. Not a simple problem, as any solution you put in place needs to constantly evolve if you are protecting anything of value.

(disclosure: work there)

The actual title of this two year old blog is "Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha"

People make good points about hCaptcha being as bad as ReCAPTCHA. Are there any alternatives to captchas? Because captchas seem to be discrimating against people outside of the western world, discriminate against people with disabilities, have lots of privacy concerns, are being used to train google AIs, etc.

I commented about FriendlyCaptcha [0] elsethread.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345606

>and hopefully eventually eliminate altogether the number of CAPTCHAs we issue

This suggests that Cloudflare wants to eventually transition to banning "people" with no way to actually access the site in case of a false positive. I don't see the elimination of CAPTCHAs as being a good thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com