Does anyone have good alternatives to old/new ReCAPTCHA? I've been scratching the surface of academic research in the area, and it's all kind of messy.<p>(It's no great secret that CloudFlare would love to switch away from ReCAPTCHA, for a whole variety of reasons. It's one of the things Tor users complain about the most, but it's an issue for a lot more users than that. We're doing a lot of stuff to reduce reliance on CAPTCHAs overall throughout 2015, but we still need a good one for some checks.)<p>I wonder if some kind of prize (anti-Turing prize?) would help. There's the core algorithm/approach question, as well as the infrastructure and deployment model question. I'm a lot more comfortable answering the latter; the former is a black art mixture of science and art.
So if google is grabbing all your profile data via the traditional reCAPTCHA but also makes you fill out a form, then it's all ok. But once it becomes obvious that they are collecting the data and they are using (the already collected) data to make it so you don't have to type in the text on the picture, <i>then</i> it's a privacy concern.<p>Or do you honestly believe they bought and continued to operate the old reCAPTCHA out of the goodness of their hearts, never collecting all that data that everybody is upset about now?
This sounds pike Google could be violating EU laws about data protection. We've seen that the EU is happy to enforce stupid laws (cookie notification; right to be forgotten) so they need to be a bit careful. They at least need a robust rebuttal to researched concerns.
I've been presented with this new captcha about a dozen times, and "failed" it every single time, whereupon it falls back to the traditional squiggly text.<p>I run Ghostery, so perhaps passing it relies on possessing some tracking cookies? If so, I'm happy to continue failing it.
Little bit off topic but, if you use only <tab> to go to checkbox and press space to select it, it brings up the good old "type the text in the image" verification (distorted text).<p>So it thought I was a robot and fallback is to use the old captcha. Well, not sure if this new captcha solves the problem it was intended to do so. Am i missing something?<p>This is quoted from their blog post about recaptcha --><p>"However, our research recently showed that today’s Artificial Intelligence technology can solve even the most difficult variant of distorted text at 99.8% accuracy."<p>Here you can test it by yourself --> <a href="https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo</a>
I assumed this was how it worked. Tracking mouse/keyboard seemed a little phony, and google is hardly a stranger to tracking personal information. It really is a bummer that there aren't many great alternatives.
I can't imagine there are many sites using this that aren't already using Google Analytics, which is already deeply integrated with their ad platform and knows exactly who you are using cookies.
Friendly reminder that every request to any Google associated server comes at the price of having your privacy invaded. Yes, this means Google Search but also GMail, Android, reCAPTCHA, Maps (any website displaying a Google Map), Google fonts (any website using Google fonts), Google CDN (any website using Google CDN), G+ (any website using an integration) et cetera.<p>In fact, completing this list with ALL Google its tentacles will probably break the character limit on HN. On a very few exceptions, Google its scooping eye is there to learn more about you.
I can't understand why anyone is surprised. Anything you load from Google's servers is used to gain more insight into your online habits.<p>It's their core business. To learn as much as possible about people online to be able to show them the most relevant ads.
I'm confused as to why people would care. It's easy to block, and if so you have to do a harder test. No one said wanting more privacy wasn't hard work.<p>For the 99% of people who don't care, it's a great improvement.<p>And if someone wants to write a better system, who's stopping them?
It's google. By this point, if anyone is really surprised they hate privacy, they have clearly been living without any internet or newspaper access for the last 10 years.