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Comment by butz | Hacker News Reader

Why are we letting Google get away with such nonsense? First(?) was the toast component, then removal of alerts, manifest v3, FLOC, now this. Sure, corporations are going to corporate away, so what are the options for us, users, and future users, who currently do not care, but might find current iteration of internet useful? I don't mind Google shutting all their products behind some wall, that requires using custom unmodifiable browser to access them, but do not spread it all over the place. We are still "enjoying" unsolvable recapthas everywhere.

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I take strong issue with the CAPTCHAs.. You're essentially training Googles' image recognition engine for free.

No, you're not. A captcha already knows the correct answers. Otherwise, it wouldn't know if your selections are correct.

Besides, Google doesn't need help in picking out pictures of motorcycles or buses or bridges.

The original reCAPTCHA, with two words: It knew the answer to one of the words and didn't know the other. At one point some users were inserting purposefully wrong answers or slurs into the unknown word to mess with the data collection.

I expect the idea is the same with images, if there are 4 buses I expect 2 it knows are correct and used as a sanity test, 1 it's pretty sure it's correct (from majority of users selecting it), and 1 has some heuristics that might be a bus but it is currently testing to see whether users believe is or not. Similarly with the 5 not a bus images.

> No, you're not. A captcha already knows the correct answers. Otherwise, it wouldn't know if your selections are correct.

It doesn't need to know that your selections are "correct", only that they match responses given by most other users.

That may be what makes it correct, but that's known in advance.

My intent was to disabuse the notion that captchas are how Google trains for image recognition.

It doesn’t know the answers are correct. I intentionally give it the wrong answers. Sometimes it realizes my answers don’t Match what is most common. So It doesn’t give me hard questions then. And doesn’t give me more than one prompt.

Because we let Apple get away with it?

https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att...

Any link regarding the toast component?

Here's a link to intent to implement: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Gl7FI...

> We are still "enjoying" unsolvable recapthas everywhere

You know, I hardly ever see those things.

They come up as part of a challenge-response when the server thinks your traffic is sus. I generally avoid them by staying logged in, not blocking cookies, and not using Tor or another route obfuscator.

In other words, enabling precise tracking of your internet activities. Maybe it doesn't bother you, but I'm pretty sure it does many others (myself included).

(BTW, the "server" is very often a reverse proxy hosted by Cloudflare that decrypts your connection to the actual server by design. In all likelihood, there's more data mining done there than we're made aware of :)

Yes, that's the main problem, that captchas are "invisible" to users logged into Google account. Not to mention some smart developers who are putting recaptchas on government websites, even when you authenticate in with your digital ID.

> They come up as part of a challenge-response when the server thinks your traffic is sus. I generally avoid them by staying logged in, not blocking cookies, and not using Tor or another route obfuscator.

Which sounds great until you leave your cozy little corner of the first world and discover that millions of people are behind CGNAT.

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