Live data from Hacker News

Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

fastcompany.com

511–520 of 566 posts

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#511
Any app should be clear and upfront about what data it collects and how it collects it, and what it does with it.

The platforms - web-browser or operating system - that run these apps - web app or native app - for the benefit of that user - should provide well-understood intuitive experience around what is allowed/possible to be collected and used from the user's device.

Now, technical mechanisms are one major part of the solution. In this regard, these mega corps should be held to a higher standards as they run the platforms as well as the biggest apps on those platforms.

But we also need legal protections that make both the application owners and the platforms owners responsible for any abuse of the user.

This particular case is eerily similar.

Credit card fraud prevention companies do the same thing - they say they need to know as much transaction data as possible in real-time for them to know which is a legitimate transaction and which is a fraud transaction. There is misdirection and fog around how they justify this with thinly veiled technical explanations about network effects and criticisms about monopolistic by design.

The reality is fraud can be prevent by designing the product differently in the first place - chip & pin - multi-factor authentication etc. technology is present to prevent theft and fraud without having to collect so much data centrally.

In this case, similarly, to prevent DDoS attacks, there are other anonymous non-data collection oriented solutions possible. More research and collaboration is needed to evolve the Internet architecture to react to DDoS attackers and other types of technical abusers of your app, catch them and prevent them from growing. Instead, we get these centralized monopolistic solutions.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#512
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have no right to use my website Of course. > Recaptcha is simply part of this negotiation. It is only a negotiation if I know it is there.

You’re commenting on HN, you know it’s there.

I'm here, and struggle to follow many of the threads on HN. As a father, I don't really see how I can effectively prepare my kids for a surveillance internet.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#513
post #5

You can view your reCaptcha V3 score here: https://recaptcha-demo.appspot.com/recaptcha-v3-request-scor... I get .7 on my iPhone, I’m guessing that my liberal use of Firefox containers and the cookie auto-delete extension on my desktop will give me a much lower score and cause me to have to jump through extra hoops at websites that implement it, just like the reCaptcha V2 does. Edit: I also got 0.7 on Firefox with st…

This is total bullshit. My score of 0.1 in firefox shoots up to 0.9 if I change my user agent to ChromeOS. No other changes - same set of ghostery/ad blocker/fingerprinting prevention, etc. What a scam.

Ding ding ding ding, Google's way of killing the other browsers in the market for good, kill off the adblockers manifest, literally become the entity which monitors the internet as much as the NSA...

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#515
How else do you want to detect humans in a widely-used centralized service like reCaptcha? This is the result of laziness of website developers. There could be thousands of custom captcha implementations but instead, most devs just put recaptcha there and they're done.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#516

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…

If the v3 script is supposed to be installed on all pages of the website, in order to track the user's actions, I don't understand how that can be done without explicit user consent under GDPR.

As long as the ONLY processing of the data is for fraud detection/prevention, then GDPR specifically allows it as a “Legitimate Interest”

Recital 47: “The processing of personal data strictly necessary for the purposes of preventing fraud also constitutes a legitimate interest of the data controller concerned…”

Recital 71: “decision-making based on … profiling should be allowed where expressly authorised by … law … including for fraud or tax evasion monitoring and prevention purposes”

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#517
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's one thing, but like why would the FT put a captcha on the login page. I am not signing up. I just want to access a website I already paid for. This is just terrible UX.

I think it's again to mitigate against potential bad actors attempting to access legitimate users' accounts.

You could use other methods but there's always tradeoffs, e.g., let's say that instead of using a captcha you just temporarily block login attempts to some account after X failed login attempts. This has the advantage that it's faster for legitimate users as you don't need to complete the captcha; however, the main disadvantage is that you can then get an attacker brute-forcing logins (even if they don't really care about getting users' credentials) which can disrupt your website by preventing potentially thousands of users from signing in.

In my opinion the captcha is the least bad option from a security point of view, as long as it has an alternative accessible mechanism for example for blind users.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#518
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.

You don't have a legal right to limit access for the disabled, which is what services like reCAPTCHA3 are doing.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#519
post #447

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…

> Since reCAPTCHA v3 scripts must be loaded on every page of a site, you must send Google your browsing history and detailed data about how you interact with sites in order to access basic services on the internet, such as paying your bills, or accessing healthcare services. From a technical pov, how does one access a user's browsing history from client-side javascript. Isn't that something the browser should protect…

If the script is loaded in the host site's context (it would have to be), it knows your current location and can use DOM APIs to inspect your browsing history (on the current site, at least) and I believe on first page visit it will also be able to identify what website sent you there. It could also potentially register event listeners to watch what links you click.
Post reply on HN