Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 245 posts

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#221

Post by kuschku »

flamtap wrote: post #29
kuschku wrote: post #9

I'm wondering if this might not be illegal under several countries' data privacy laws. Users need to be directly and visibly be informed, if and when data of theirs will be transmitted to third parties. As Google's ReCaptcha is based on tracking what websites you visit, what search terms you enter, correlating this data, and comparing this tracking profile of yours, it's quite problematic that the user doesn't even s…

I can see this easily addressed by a TOS. Even the subtle ones like "clicking that button means you agree to [link to TOS]" covers it, no?

Nope, not at all. ToS terms and EULA terms are basically null and void for such things under EU law.

You actually have to make a separate, opt-in checkbox, directly informing the user what will happen.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#222

Post by tonyedgecombe »

patrickaljord wrote: post #126
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It modifies your behaviour in ways that aren't in your interest.

Why isn't it in my interest to be shown ads that offer me goods and services of my interests?

I'm amazed that isn't obvious to you, they are there to influence your buying habits in the interest of the advertiser.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#223

Post by kuschku »

sowbug wrote: post #182
mrighele wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is "free work" since I'm helping training Google's algorithms and I don't get money back. Note that the service is free for the site owner, but not for the end user, which has to invest his/her own time.

Taxes work the same way. You pay money (or, if you wish, you work for money you don't get to keep) but don't get money in return. Rather, the money goes toward societal improvements. You can debate whether they're societal improvements you personally care about, but it's not a very interesting debate, because societal benefits aren't meant to be uniformly attractive to everyone.

Except, everything funded by my taxes has to be open, freely accessible, etc.

Google is using ReCaptcha as measure to get an unfair edge over competitors and make competing even more impossible.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#224

Post by kuschku »

arjie wrote: post #171
michaelt wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you're at an airport and an inspector takes your batteries out of your luggage. All other things being equal, does it matter if he tosses them in the trash, or keeps them for his personal use? From one perspective it doesn't matter - your batteries are gone either way. But from another perspective, inspectors who keep what they find have completely different motivations - making the same outcome much more sin…

It makes sense there because the actual consequences are undesirable. What are the undesirable consequences we're incentivising here? That Google will cover the entire web in captchas?

That Google gets an unfair advantage compared to other companies, making it harder to start a new company able to compete with Google on Machine Learning? (Which is already impossible, because Google uses the knowledge from ReCaptcha, GMail, etc unfairly)

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#225

Post by User_424 »

stoolpigeon wrote: post #209
AlwaysRock wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother teaches math to at risk youth in the Denver area. He has students that don't speak a lot of English (their primary language is Spanish) and he's trying to explain math concepts to them. He realized he can use google translate and get 95% of the information across that he needs to. I've never personally hired a professional translator and I don't think I would if I was going to travel to a country where the…

Google translate is decent for some languages and really poor for others - so I'd run it by some native speakers before you rely on it for anything important.

Work in the Language Service Industry. Google translate for a few languages is decent at best for social conversations. It is never used in serious business translations. The technology still has a long way to go.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#226

Post by Viper007Bond »

awqrre wrote: post #21
malikNF wrote: post #5

While I like the idea of not having to deal with these annoying ReCAPTCHA prompts, something somehow feels "intrusive ?". I mean does this mean google is going to keep track of what I would be doing when I visit a site? Say for instance I am signing up for a website, does the password I enter get sent to google servers to be analyzed now?

if javascript is enabled, it should be trivial to detect a human... (but of course they can log everything)

You don't give bot authors enough credit. They can run JavaScript too and try to replicate human behavior.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#227

Post by danso »

kuschku wrote: post #223
sowbug wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes work the same way. You pay money (or, if you wish, you work for money you don't get to keep) but don't get money in return. Rather, the money goes toward societal improvements. You can debate whether they're societal improvements you personally care about, but it's not a very interesting debate, because societal benefits aren't meant to be uniformly attractive to everyone.

Except, everything funded by my taxes has to be open, freely accessible, etc. Google is using ReCaptcha as measure to get an unfair edge over competitors and make competing even more impossible.

> Except, everything funded by my taxes has to be open, freely accessible, etc.

You must not be living in the U.S. Even as strong as the FOIA and public records laws are, there's a huge amount of information and records that are exempted from free access:

http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/digital-journ...

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#228

Post by barbolo »

albeebe1 wrote: post #10

I'd love to hear some commentary from someone involved in the business of bypassing captchas. I have to assume "google invisible captcha hack" is getting bid up right now.

Every now and then I have to train models (mostly neural networks) that bypass captchas.

My company provides web automation in Brazil, not for spam, not for marketing purposes. Sometimes the client has a website (like an intranet) that she wants to automate through screen scraping. I know it sounds stupid, but that is pretty frequent.

The models are fast (most captchas solved under 100ms in AWS Lambda) and accurate (95 to 100%). I have about 40 different captchas being solved this way.

My team is still working on a solution to nocaptcha recaptcha. The problem for me is not solving the challenges, but submitting them like a human would do.

I'm progressing with chromium headless. As more and more sites add this captcha, I need to find a solution to automate it. And I'm confident I will find.

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#229

Post by tdb7893 »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #75
malikNF wrote: post #5

While I like the idea of not having to deal with these annoying ReCAPTCHA prompts, something somehow feels "intrusive ?". I mean does this mean google is going to keep track of what I would be doing when I visit a site? Say for instance I am signing up for a website, does the password I enter get sent to google servers to be analyzed now?

It's just one more of the many elements of Google puzzle. They control most web searches, GA is a de facto standard of web analytics, Gmail is the most popular mail service, not to mention other free services, Android etc. etc., Google can easily track you all the way from the moment you open your browser (likely, Chrome...), through your searches, visits and actions. It's high time people realized giving so much pow…

The saving grace here is that there are alternatives for all those services and I can switch pretty easily at any time so honestly it's less urgent to me

Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA

#230

Post by macrael »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #220
macrael wrote: post #4

Google using captchas to get humans to read street addresses captured by street view cars to improve maps results remains one of the most Googly things they've ever done. Genius, lateral, and a little weird.

Goog-411 predates that quite a bit an dis arguably more Googley. Launching a free 411 service (at a time when you usually paid per minute for that) and using it to improve your voice recognition algorithms. It was essentially "OK Google" for dumb phones. For anyone not familiar, 411 (in the US at least) was the directory service number. You could call it to get things like what time a restaurant was open until. Direc…

They also gave out free voicemail for the same reason, no?
Post reply on HN