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ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

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Re: ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep noticed this a long time ago and am very suspicious

A visitor from TOR is extraordinarily more likely to be abusive. It makes total sense to put up extra barriers, which is still short of blocking TOR users altogether, which is also fair for webmasters who don't want to deal with it.

I’ve always found it weird how people jump hoops to be apologists for Protonmail

Does anybody else find that weird?

“I completely misunderstood Swiss privacy laws and fell for a sales pitch from an email and VPN company that goes out of its way to track every user no matter how they sign up! Its to avoid email abuse, exclusively!”

Re: ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

#72

Their response on twitter [1]: "The recaptcha, when it shows up (in rare situations), is sandboxed so that it doesn't send any data to Google. We are also in the process of replacing it with hcaptcha." Not sure what possible sandboxing they could be referring to - if they load the captcha in an iframe from a different origin then it is true that Google's javascript can't access things on the Protonmail origin, but th…

What data is being sent to Google? Besides the user interacting with Google to solve the captcha? Or is that the problem?

Re: ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

#73
post #3

Last week ProtonMail integrated Google's Recaptcha to their Login Page. As a project that advocates Privacy and Security, and was an immediate response to the Snowden Leaks, I find this kinda ironic that they now set the Google PREFs cookie for all of their users - while they still maintain the same marketing on their website. And well, I am looking for new options now, I guess.

Have you contacted them? It doesn’t take a whole team of people to implement recaptcha. Could just be the mistake of one engineer who was tasked to “add a captcha to the login form”. I hope you don’t assume the worst without investigating further.

They use UserVoice for voting on issues (not sure if anyone ever looks at it). Here's one for recaptcha, and it's one of the most voted on tickets: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-protonmail/su...

Re: ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

#74
post #38

I can understand requiring a captcha for registering, but not for logging in. Also: does anyone know if they have to do this even if you have a Protonmail cookie set in your session?

I wonder if it's a response to the recent incident with Ryanair plane got grounded by Belarus. I believe an anonymous email with a bomb threat was sent with ProtonMail.

Re: ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two PM accounts. Since implementation, every single login includes Captcha. I log in twice a day, Captcha is never omitted.

If you are using Tor or VPN, this might be the case. Another possibility is that you (or somebody on your network, or ISP in the case of NAT/shared mobile IP), have installed an app that is using an SDK like Luminati [1] or similar, which is causing the IP to be abused in the brute force attempts our anti-abuse systems are trying to prevent. [1] https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/hk-en/security/news/cybercr...

Never used HolaVPN (apparently a prerequisite for Luminati). Never heard of it. Only turn my VPN on once in a blue moon for a few minutes.

Re: ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

#76
post #68
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I can't remember the last time I got a captcha of any kind, so it has definitely been rare for me.

That probably means you have tracking enabled. I'm not a protonmail user (I host my own email) but from my general experience with recaptcha, try opening it in a private navigation window. If recaptcha doesn't ask you to solve anything, they've already been tracking you to make up its mind. Of course, whether this is fine by you is up to you, but it sounds like you might be unaware of this.

No, there's no tracking in ProtonMail. Captchas appearing is entirely based upon IP reputation and number of recent login attempts.

Re: ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

#77
post #68
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I can't remember the last time I got a captcha of any kind, so it has definitely been rare for me.

That probably means you have tracking enabled. I'm not a protonmail user (I host my own email) but from my general experience with recaptcha, try opening it in a private navigation window. If recaptcha doesn't ask you to solve anything, they've already been tracking you to make up its mind. Of course, whether this is fine by you is up to you, but it sounds like you might be unaware of this.

Thanks, I appreciate it! I still don't see the captcha even when I use a private window thought. Browser is Brave on Mac. Also outside the private window I have shields up, which means trackers, ads, cross-site cookies and fingerprinting are all blocked.

Edit: also it says there are 0 items blocked

Re: ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

#78

Their response on twitter [1]: "The recaptcha, when it shows up (in rare situations), is sandboxed so that it doesn't send any data to Google. We are also in the process of replacing it with hcaptcha." Not sure what possible sandboxing they could be referring to - if they load the captcha in an iframe from a different origin then it is true that Google's javascript can't access things on the Protonmail origin, but th…

hcaptcha is not much better than recaptcha, in that its only ‘improvement’ is shifting data extraction from google to cloudflare. also, captcha in general shifts burden onto and penalizes legitimate users, especially privacy-conscious ones, in addition to malicious ones. that is, false positive rates are too high to achieve acceptable false negative rates. it would be better not to use a centralized captcha service,…

Do you have any suggestions for alternatives?

Re: ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

#79
A few comments about this.

A very small fraction of logins get the CAPTCHA challenge. We, and other services, face unrelenting brute force attacks on our login endpoints. If you are seeing a CAPTCHA on login, chances are that something about your connection is suspicious to our system. It's far from perfect, and we continue to improve it, but at most a percent or two of users are seeing CAPTCHA at any time.

The CAPTCHA is run in an iframe on a separate domain to sandbox it from the Proton login flow prevent it from compromising the webapp. Obviously Google still gets some information, but we do all we can to limit this.

CAPTCHAs are very hard to build, especially considering Google has a habit of clearing the field with it's own captcha-breaking code. Most companies do not have the resources to build their own. We had an alternative CAPTCHA we were going to use as a replacement a few years ago and then the company behind it went bankrupt. We are currently looking to replace ReCAPTCHA with hcaptcha, which should alleviate some of these problems.

We have other strategies which we are also exploring to try to reduce the need for CAPTCHAs entirely, but these are also not trivial to build and integrate into all clients.

TL;DR It's a small fraction of users who are affected, it's necessary to protect our users from brute force login attacks, we don't like it either and are working hard on replacements.

Re: ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t self-hosting also have privacy downsides, being that all the hardware is tied to you? I’d imagine whatever minor resistance to wiretapping a multiuser site gave regarding privacy of non-investigated individuals would disappear.

The 1986 electronic privacy act consider emails older than 180 days old to be “abandoned” and do not require a warrant to access. Self-hosting at least means that this should not apply, I think.

From what I can see there was a House resolution passed in 2017 which protects email. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/email-privacy-act-come...
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