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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

#271

Post by Faark »

jimmaswell wrote: post #215
oil25 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reCAPTCHA on VPN is difficult, but on the Tor network, they are downright impossible. I've never been able to get past it, even after a few dozen painful attempts. That means Google services are entirely off-limits over Tor, even Search, which is a disgrace.

You can hardly blame anyone for blocking Tor traffic. You might not be using it for abuse but a large volume of abuse originates from it.

And that will never change if significant services keep blocking Tor users. Thus we have a feedback loop effectively fighting privacy...

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#272

Post by megous »

asdff wrote: post #145
fasicle wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how much Ublock Origin makes a difference. I have a score of 0.9 with it turned on.

I think this score is fishy. Ran the test three times and got three different scores.

When I just keep reloading, I get either 0.9 or 0.1. I get 0.1 more often. Interesting.

Maybe some browser extension can monitor the score and tell me what it currently is on each page load, when reCaptcha is used on some website. I'd just keep reloading, until it's good, and then try the captcha.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#273

Post by shawnz »

jedberg wrote: post #196
shawnz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to the results here, using Firefox + uBlock with DNT and tracking protection enabled, I get a score of 0.9. In private browsing mode it's 0.7. I wonder how many people here are using a VPN or accessing from a non-western country -- I'd bet those are much bigger factors

Were you logged into your Google account? That seems to almost guarantee a .9

Yes, although not when private browsing of course.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#274

Post by benologist »

mrguyorama wrote: post #263
spicytunacone wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be able to say how your company accomplishes that?

Honestly, statistics from about 2010 (ie before the age of neural network hype) and limited human observation.

Human moderation and ad-hoc heuristics seems to make the difference at Reddit too, rather than the CAPTCHA at registration.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#275

Post by ehsankia »

gfosco wrote: post #228
benreesman wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What other reasons do you think the original post was implying for Google to collect all this data?

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#276

Post by jimmaswell »

Faark wrote: post #271
jimmaswell wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can hardly blame anyone for blocking Tor traffic. You might not be using it for abuse but a large volume of abuse originates from it.

And that will never change if significant services keep blocking Tor users. Thus we have a feedback loop effectively fighting privacy...

Somehow I doubt most Tor users are really just in it for privacy for general browsing, especially since it's so slow and limited. You can get a VPN for that. Unless you're a total privacy purist, there's not much incentive to use Tor unless you're buying drugs/something else illegal or just curious to look around the dark web.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#279

Post by Michielvv »

cm2187 wrote: post #259

Stupid question: why do companies care so much about bots to the point of degrading the customer experience significantly? I can understand for things like public forums. But like why would an ecommerce website ever put a captcha between you and your order (or a news website)?

For example: - bots sign up with email addresses that are owned by other people that don't appreciate your welcome/activation/etc. mails. - all that automatically generated data can start to hurt performance. Especially on a smaller site, having millions of useless users in your database can slow things down significantly.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#280

Post by avarun »

jakobegger wrote: post #269
benreesman wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit that I inferred the proposed intent for grabbing maximum personal data, but if you’re interested in anecdotes from the trenches: no one below senior director level gets a couple million in stock for any other reason than they pushed CTR by a few basis points. What I was trying to say is that seen through the lens of mechanism design no one is incentivized to query the like button table because there’s no upsi…

I'm not sure I understand correctly. Are you saying that all the personal user data is in reality not as valuable as everyone says it is? That is, all those megacorps are collecting terabytes of mostly useless data? Then why is this data collected and archived in the first place?

Yes, that's exactly what he's saying.

It's mostly all collected because it's easier for them to collect it than not to collect it, and nobody is stopping them from collecting it.

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