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Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

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Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#221

Post by SkyBelow »

btown wrote: post #186
seieste wrote: post #74

There are government services, such as the USPTO, that rely on Google reCAPTCHA. The new reCAPTCHA has made it difficult for me to access documents, and sometimes they think that I'm a bot and thus deny me access entirely. Does the government realize the consequences of this? Both that it pushes users to use Chromium-based browsers, and that they're helping to solidify a company that already has a near monopoly in th…

To be fair, government at all levels did the same for Adobe by mandating that things be done in the PDF file format. Consistency of government operations sometimes requires that certain private companies be preferred vendors, and of course there's going to be a snowball effect there as big players get increasingly larger shares of available funds. Every government in history has had a government-industrial complex wi…

> Consistency of government operations sometimes requires that certain private companies be preferred vendors

In which case those private companies should now be deemed an extension of the government and fall under all rules a government organization has to abide by. If they do not like it they can forbid the government from using their software/products and can sue if the government does not abide.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#222

Post by danShumway »

dbtx wrote: post #183
danShumway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Firefox fingerprint resisting turned on and with Ublock Origin/UMatrix, I get a score of 0.1. And I'm not even on a VPN; I'm sure on my home network I'd have an even lower score. To me, it feels like Google's entire strategy behind reCaptcha is to make it harder to protect your privacy. We've basically given up on the idea that there are tasks only humans can do, and to me V3 feels like Google openly saying, "Yo…

> it feels like Google's entire strategy behind reCaptcha is to make it harder to protect your privacy For the irony, I'm still logged into GMail and it still works perfectly, as basic HTML, even with google.com forbidden to run scripts. But it's the flippin' reCaptchas all over the place that make me temp-allow google.com, and then a reload later, temp-allow gstatic.com and reload again. Only then I get to use someo…

Dunno if it's changed recently or if I just didn't refresh enough before, but I'm now seeing basically random numbers as well.

If anyone wants a fun weekend project, I would love for there to be a few public sites I can reliably check my production score on.

I'm not sure it matters though, since I'm just ignoring most sites that use reCaptcha now. For sites I can't ignore, I've taken to emailing them with my requests instead -- recently I tried to use Spotify's internal data export tool and it wouldn't let me past. If you're not going to let me use a website to manage my existing account, then your support team can do it for me.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#223

Post by benreesman »

dessant wrote: post #126

Google has been doing the same with reCAPTCHA v2 [1]. They are aware of the legal risk of outright blocking users from accessing services, so reCAPTCHA v3 contains no user facing UI, Google merely makes a suggestion in the form of a user score, so the responsibility to delay or block access and the legal liability that comes with it falls on websites. reCAPTCHA v2 is superseded by v3 because it presents a broader opp…

Your comment adds a lot to the conversation, so I don’t want to be more contrary than necessary.

It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years).

Much like the highest information-gain feature for the future price of a security is it’s most recent price: ad historical CTR and user historical CTR (called “clickiness” in the business) are basically the whole show when predicting user cross ad CTR. The big shops like to ham up their data advantage with one hand (to advertisers) while washing the other hand of it (to regulators).

As with so many things Hanlon’s Razor cuts deeply here: if your browsing history can juice CTR prediction then I’ve never seen it. I have seen careers premised on that idea, but I’ve never seen it work.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#226

Post by dheera »

oarsinsync wrote: post #136
dangrossman wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's wrong if a bot buys some of your inventory, pays for it and everything? 100% of the time, a bot buying things from a store is doing so to test a database of stolen credit cards the bot's owner has purchased/stolen. Accepting those sales means you'll get hit with chargebacks a few weeks later as the real owners of those cards see their statements. Then your store gets shut down for exceeding the maximum 1% ch…

Do you have any stats on cart abandonment rate, and/or how that changed after you enabled recaptcha?

"Cart abandonment"

Why is this a bot-specific thing? I abandon shopping carts as a human all the time, including especially:

* If you require a registration and login to checkout

* If your UI is too hard or clunky to use

* If shipping fees are higher than what I think is fair

* If there are additional non-upfront fees

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#227

Post by jchook »

reCAPTCHA apparently doesn't stop bots well at all.

When I published a brand new site, I got thousands of bot sign-ups in the first couple weeks. reCAPTCHA apparently had no effect on stopping them. The bots signed-up with real user emails, causing my site to send unsolicited email to them, which affected my domain's email reputation significantly.

I rolled my own invisible CAPTCHA and immediately stopped ALL the bot traffic.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#228

Post by gfosco »

benreesman wrote: post #223
dessant wrote: post #126

Google has been doing the same with reCAPTCHA v2 [1]. They are aware of the legal risk of outright blocking users from accessing services, so reCAPTCHA v3 contains no user facing UI, Google merely makes a suggestion in the form of a user score, so the responsibility to delay or block access and the legal liability that comes with it falls on websites. reCAPTCHA v2 is superseded by v3 because it presents a broader opp…

Your comment adds a lot to the conversation, so I don’t want to be more contrary than necessary. It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years). Much like the highest information-gain feature for the future price of a…

I think it's worth pointing out that the comment you replied to didn't mention money, advertising, or CTR. People are concerned about data collection for more reasons than that. You've seen these attempts and entire careers about it without "juicing" CTR, so perhaps that isn't the true intent.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#230

Post by dessant »

dessant wrote: post #126

Google has been doing the same with reCAPTCHA v2 [1]. They are aware of the legal risk of outright blocking users from accessing services, so reCAPTCHA v3 contains no user facing UI, Google merely makes a suggestion in the form of a user score, so the responsibility to delay or block access and the legal liability that comes with it falls on websites. reCAPTCHA v2 is superseded by v3 because it presents a broader opp…

This comment has been detached, originally it was a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20295333.
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