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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

#491

Post by rjf72 »

benreesman wrote: post #456
cyphar wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is “If it weren’t FB who would be doing it instead?” [...] “Should cheap digital cameras be illegal?” Those are a complete non-sequitur. Facebook (and Google) analyse every single photo that goes through their system with state-of-the-art ML (it's so good that it almost beat humans at matching faces ~5 years ago). This is a scale of surveillance which the human race has never encountered before in our…

I think you overestimate the degree to which SOTA computer vision is applied to a lot of images online, and I think bringing East Germany into it is pretty out of line.

There's a very good reason to consider negative outcomes of the past in discussions such as this. Let's pretend companies like Google and Facebook are totally on the up and up; pretend the company that aims to facilitate a user tracking search engine for China that is doing things including literally blacklisting searches such as "human rights", is on the up and up.

The reason what these amazingly benevolent companies are doing and collecting matters is because the systems we build today are precisely what will power the dystopias of tomorrow. As the GP mentioned, Nazi Germany used census data to select and track their victims, aided by some primitive computational technology built for the Nazis by IBM. In spite of how primitive all of this technology was, it ended up being quite effective at enabling them to achieve their ends.

Now compare this to the systems we're building today. Genuinely bad people do, and will, manage to take power in any system. It's not a question of if, but when. And these systems that we're building will be at their disposal. It's the same reason that in politics if you're considering granting the government more power you shouldn't think about today, but about tomorrow. Not do I want "this" administration to have those powers, but do I want future administrations - whom I will vehemently disagree with, to have those powers?

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#492

Post by KirinDave »

bad_user wrote: post #323
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…

How about our friends and family? Should we configure a VPN for them too? Btw the argument you just made applies to any form of surveillance or censorship. Just because your can still find functional VPN services for China, is China's great firewall OK? And what happens when web services start blocking VPNs? Netflix does it quite successfully. And I'm sure Cloudflare could provide such a service for free.

Just so you know, that commercial VPN is almost certainly spying on you.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#493

Post by KirinDave »

OrgNet wrote: post #375
miohtama wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potential other causes - Your ISP is a source of a lot of malicious traffic - You have some browser extension or other adjustments that makes it harder to analyse you as a genuine web browser For example, using a browser automation like Selenium testing triggers "hard" reCAPTCHA. Not sure if this because of some automated API that Selenium exposes, or just because your browser profile looks virgin (no cookies) withou…

I use pretty standard extensions... uBlockO, decentral eyes, smart referrer... I just wish that companies would stop using Google's reCAPTCHA service. Also my IP address rarely changes and I don't think that any malicious traffic is coming from it. And I have Comcast, so I hope that they didn't blacklist all of us... (I did talk bad about Google a few times though, maybe that's it)

Stop using smart referrer. It has no legitimate purposes. Referrer URLs are not the problem. You look like a bot and you going to get locked out of sites.

If you're actually concerned about that kind of data leakage, you want NoScript, full stop.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#494

Post by byonge »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #73
cyphar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the answer is (basically) all of them. Combined with CloudFlare, even websites that aren't explicitly making that decision are still opting their users into both CloudFlare and Google's tracking. I use Tor fairly regularly and it's a complete nightmare. I sometimes spend 5-15 minutes solving reCAPTCHA (since your Tor circuit changes every 10 minutes this can result in having to solve the reCAPTCHA seve…

Crummy solution, but get the FF user agent switcher in TBB. And then set it to Windows/Chrome. And all those Scroogle-captchas are easy-peasy.

can you expound on this? not sure I grok

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#495

Post by pushpop »

__jal wrote: post #299
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…

> 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…

This. Absolutely this!

Do I think Facebook/Google/etc are abusing my data right now? Probably not.

But do I think that large scale collection of my data could be abused in the future? Most definitely. If the Cambridge Analytica scandal has taught us anything, it’s that having access to this data is rife for abuse and often it might happen in unexpected ways.

And do I owe an explanation for wanting some basic privacy? Absolutely not. If a random stranger stopped me in the street and asked me lots of personal questions there wouldn’t be an expectation that I have to respond. Yet the likes of Facebook and Google seem he’ll bent on turning the discussion around when it’s data collected online.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#496

Post by kabacha »

KirinDave wrote: post #487

I'm... actually struggling to see what this dark side is. The data is collected under a non-reuse agreement. It's specifically there to make a good captcha. There are other captcha vendors, and they don't make that promise (and I can think of at least one who admits they collect and resell data via captcha). So the downside here is that no one has a credible way to compete with Google? Maybe because their Google cook…

> The data is collected under a non-reuse agreement

Oh you sweet summer child. Would you by any chance be interested in buying a bridge?

Despite that, even assuming if it's true and we'll have a lovely accurate AI captcha system. The big down-side is that captcha is breaking programmable web. I maintain a lot of small software crawlers from simple notification applets to bigger analytic crawlers and the web in the past few years has been increasingly hostile towards this. API endpoints are disappearing and in general make distributing free apps very difficult. The web-crawlers are super simple to write and even maintain but services like cloudflare, distils, captcha break them and while there's always solutions to these systems they are very hard to distribute to users (you can't really pack in pupeteer, selenium or some other webengine automation stack with your app).

Public data should be public. These sort of idiotic measures are not compatible with web protocol. The web only know one thing - 1 IP address == 1 person and it should be encouraged not dismissed.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#497

Post by feanaro »

KirinDave wrote: post #487

I'm... actually struggling to see what this dark side is. The data is collected under a non-reuse agreement. It's specifically there to make a good captcha. There are other captcha vendors, and they don't make that promise (and I can think of at least one who admits they collect and resell data via captcha). So the downside here is that no one has a credible way to compete with Google? Maybe because their Google cook…

It's a land grab of the general web and browser market, not of the captcha market. They're using the captcha to disincentivize users from using browsers other than Chrome or from not having a Google account. And now with v3, it's supposed to happen on every page of the web? It shouldn't be too hard to see it's a disaster.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#498

Post by qtplatypus »

stickfigure wrote: post #374
__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…

They have no right to it, and I have every right to try to limit their visibility. That's entirely fair! But also: You have no right to use my website, and I have every right to limit your access. Recaptcha is simply part of this negotiation.

That's not totally true. If you provide access to your web site to people then in many places in the world you can't limit that access in a way that discriminates against protected classes.

In the US for example you can't set up your web site in a way that accessing it discriminates against people with disabilities.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#499

Post by qtplatypus »

incompatible wrote: post #420
ballenf wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have the feeling that making mistakes — selecting an image that looks like a traffic light but isn’t — sometimes results in faster admittance than being surgically accurate. Again, being slower and more error prone seems to be rewarded.

I don't even know what the right answer is in a lot of cases. There's a bit of the traffic light casing at the edge of a square, does that count as a traffic light, or only the lamp itself?

The right answer isn't what it is looking for. Its more looking for the way you try and work out the answer.
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