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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

#381

Post by dmitriid »

benreesman wrote: post #379
dmitriid wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs of compliance are not too high. Compliance is actually ridiculously easy for new companies: they need to collect only the data they need. That is all there is

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regu...

Yes. Your point? It’s actually ridiculously easy to be compliant with GDPR.

Edit: That is, ridiculously easy for new companies. Incumbents have been hoarding data for too long and it was actually harder for existing companies to become compliant.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#382

Post by benreesman »

stOneskull wrote: post #346
benreesman wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not making a moral argument for the surveillance state, I wear Curve25519 on one arm and the word “citizenfour” on the other. I agree that there is a vast and almost impossible to regulate overreach by these companies. Your argument is extremely compelling. But when HN users complain about being spied on I smell a FAANG rejection letter.

People care about others, not just themselves.

I agree, but search “HN levels.fyi” to understand that we’re in the minority on that.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#383

Post by hedora »

jcomis wrote: post #47

I hate the v3 reCAPTCHA. On FF, I usually KNOW I am answering correctly and it says I failed. I always have to go through it multiple times. It's maddening. It often leaves me second guessing myself... is that sliver of car counted? is a crossing signal a street light? What about those streetlights way off in the distance, do I select those two in addition to the ones front and center? That RV looks sort of like a bu…

I intentionally get a few wrong (to subvert their harvesting of manually labeled training data).

It still either lets me through, or doesn’t even manage to display images for me to click on because it doesn’t like my browser settings. (The latter is more common than the former these days...)

I wonder how much legitimate traffic bounces because of reCaptcha. Can sites even measure this?

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#384

Post by SquareWheel »

megous wrote: post #267
SquareWheel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reCaptcha isn't able to read your non-Google cookies or history, so most of that isn't being considered.

https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/reCAPTCHA/in... Yeah, no. It certainly can read non-google cookies on the page (not httpOnly cookies, though).

I'm not sure what the link is meant to show, but "cookies on the page" is very different than the years worth of user history and cookies that GP mentioned.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#385

Post by __jal »

benreesman wrote: post #314
__jal wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). That may be the case for some people, but that is not my complaint, nor that of many folks I know. I simply don't care how FB, Google and other surveillance outfits mak…

You could either stop using these services or (as I suspect) you find them too valuable to dismiss entirely quarantine them to a VPN/incognito interaction in less time than it took to type that comment. I don’t want to single you out personally but there’s a broad trend on HN of bitter-sounding commentary on the surveillance powers of these companies by people who can easily defeat any tracking that it’s economical f…

> or (as I suspect) you find them too valuable to dismiss entirely quarantine

You are wrong. I block the known IP blocks of the big surveillance shops and a lot of the small ones[1].

> sour grapes that a mediocre employee at one of these places makes 3-20x what anyone makes

Are you sincerely saying you believe people who are uneasy about surveillance are just jealous?

[1] Twitter is currently an exception, I was playing with something. But I'm going back to blocking them soon.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#386

Post by literallycancer »

kbenson wrote: post #340
benreesman wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could either stop using these services or (as I suspect) you find them too valuable to dismiss entirely quarantine them to a VPN/incognito interaction in less time than it took to type that comment. I don’t want to single you out personally but there’s a broad trend on HN of bitter-sounding commentary on the surveillance powers of these companies by people who can easily defeat any tracking that it’s economical f…

> You could either stop using these services or How do you stop using a service when you have little or no indication that it does something like this before hand, and afterwards the privacy is already gone? If I use a site and view my profile page and the url contains aa account id or username and some google or facebook analytics is loaded, or a like button is sitting somewhere, how am I to know that before the pag…

You use something that blocks scripts (like uMatrix) with an aggressive ruleset. On some sites you'll need to allow things to make them work. If they are loading trackers from the same servers that they load content from, you can't do much without wasting more time than you want. I'd say it breaks most of the tracking though.

More sites than you'd expect work without js or with first-party js only. It's annoying when you need to read a news site, because those are usually bloated garbage. Not a huge loss.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#387

Post by peterangular »

amirhirsch wrote: post #343
peterangular wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any services like AC or 2captcha integrated against you?

we've seen people asking them to integrate us on social media. you should see my comment about epidemic analysis above.

It won't take long if you guys get popular. I don't say this as a rip - I just have never come into contact with your CAPTCHA.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#388

Post by hello_newman »

nothis wrote: post #77
pergadad wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of small companies/private website owners might make a simple cost/benefit calculation - 15% less users but in return X reduced false accounts/traffic/...

This is a problem that has to be solved by government regulation, “the market” has already made up its mind: It doesn’t give a fuck.

The last thing the internet needs is "government regulation". If that were to happen, you could kiss everything you love about the internet goodbye. Governments do a horrible job regulating basically everything else other than critical, necessary services, and the jury is still out even on that one. Why would they suddenly do such a better job regulating something we're still all trying to figure out?

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#389

Post by benreesman »

deckard1 wrote: post #371
benreesman wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could either stop using these services or (as I suspect) you find them too valuable to dismiss entirely quarantine them to a VPN/incognito interaction in less time than it took to type that comment. I don’t want to single you out personally but there’s a broad trend on HN of bitter-sounding commentary on the surveillance powers of these companies by people who can easily defeat any tracking that it’s economical f…

> You could either stop using these services No you can't. Facebook creates shadow profiles for every single person in the world. If any single one of your friends has WhatsApp, Facebook has your phone number. They have your phone number and the entire address book of your friend, who probably has friends in common. If two of your friends have WhatsApp and they both have your number... You see where I'm going here? T…

There’s a reasonable argument in there, but it applies to any world in which digital cameras are cheap.

This is in a sense the worst kind of argument: superficially correct but really meant to tap into a popular groundswell of sentiment.

The question isn’t “can FB use an off-the-shelf CNN to identify me personally” but rather:

“If it weren’t FB who would be doing it instead?”

and:

“Should cheap digital cameras be illegal?”

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#390

Post by benreesman »

bongobongo wrote: post #361
benreesman wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild speculative hyperbole hurts the case of people like you and I who care about doing something positive on the ground today.

It is not "wild speculative hyperbole" not to give the benefit of the doubt to companies that have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

GPS tracker installed in people’s skull sounds hyperbolic to me.
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