Cloudflare Stops Using ReCAPTCHA

by _vbdg on 4/4/2020, 5:40 PM with 26 comments
  • by mmm_grayons on 4/4/2020, 5:43 PM

    More specifically, it now uses a service called hCaptcha: https://www.hcaptcha.com/

    It appears it pays people to use the captchas by providing data labeling. This is similar to Google's business case for running ReCAPTCHA, just labeling others' data instead.

  • by motge on 4/5/2020, 10:58 AM

    If no content blocker like µBlock is used, Google will probably find out about the website visit through Google Analytics. But the important difference is that Analytics is not essential for visiting a website while the CAPTCHA from the CloudFlare page in front of the website is.

    But the change is especially good for Tor users as they are often blocked from using Google reCAPTCHA (due to "suspicious" activity from the network) at all.

    Finally I hope more companies follow the lead of CloudFlare and change some parts of their services to not solely use Google so that the web becomes more diverse again.

  • by mikkelam on 4/5/2020, 10:29 AM

    With my pretty aggressively tuned privacy settings in Firefox I'm getting captchaed CONSTANTLY, and everybody is apparently using cloudflare. Here's hoping hCaptcha is less aggressive..

  • by lostmsu on 4/5/2020, 4:32 AM

    Oh boy, time to update uMatrix rules.

  • by rectang on 4/4/2020, 6:01 PM

    Hopefully this is better for people who don't browse the web while logged into their Google accounts.

  • by Ayesh on 4/5/2020, 12:33 PM

    hCaptcha is annoying! Even when I'm not logged into Google, I rarely get a captcha when I click "I'm not a robot". With the new captcha, I get promoted 100% of the time.

    I'm glad Google is out of the picture (although their DNS, Google analytics/ tag manager, chrome, maps, etc) would know my history anyways. But hCaptcha needs to be less greedy when it wants free labeling labour.