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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

Users are punished if Google is unaware of them. I built an iOS app for a major brand but the web view would load with no cookies in a sandbox, and we realized after roll out that all users were needing to solve 10+ hard CAPTCHA challenges to be let through, as Google was unfamiliar with the users. You’ll get a similar experience loading over a VPN. We removed it.

It’s easy to why device attestation is so alluring to these companies. Anonymity and bots look alike.

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It's time to build for the bots instead of fighting them.

If only people built reasonable bots. The issue is mostly not with the bots existing, but with them flooding services with traffic without any backoff/throttling. And that's not even just the rando ones - Bing is often just as bad here.

i didnt even think of that but makes sense. valuable pov.

either way im sure most people are just annoyed with the gate code then they are with the tracking and would take the cookie everytime. and i feel like this is similar to many things especially with google.

but people just would rather just believe these companies are against them haha. kinda silly imo

Unfortunately it's not just getting the difficult captchas. If you try enough to maintain privacy and become invisible to the likes of Google/Meta, you have trouble creating accounts.

Like you might create an Instagram account and be automatically banned in an hour for no apparent reason.

But as you say, it totally makes sense.

as the author of the app, why is captcha enabled for the website?

Of course, if you're merely embedding someone else's site then it makes a lot of sense to get captcha'ed to death.

Same company. It's a shopping app, with one of its tabs instead embedding the more sensitive pharmacy ecom side. This skipped $millions in build out, but we were perplexed when no one used it.

CAPTCHA was on for this large company because they see a lot of fraud and it removed the simplest cases of it. We turned it off when within the app, but it was a stop gap. Not sure what came after.

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