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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

#401

Post by beart »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #194
beart wrote: post #175

If it takes me longer than 5 seconds to access the content I'm looking for, I close the tab. Am I alone in this?

I doubt you're consistent with it. You'd probably wait 10+ seconds to post an HN comment for example. Easy to say you'd bounce on a website you didn't care about. That's a bit of a tautology.

reCAPTCHA is often used at sign-up time. Unless I'm paying a parking ticket or something, if I can't get through your sign up process in a few seconds, then you've already lost my interest.

There are so many SAAS products now, and it doesn't take much to lose out on potential users. It doesn't really impact my life much because, as you said, I probably don't have much investment in it in the first place.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#402

Post by benreesman »

kbenson wrote: post #391
benreesman wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the information-theoretic validity of your argument, but if you think that one of these firms cares enough about your buying preferences to burn enough compute to find that correlation then you either work for the CIA or are mistaken.

It doesn't take a lot of compute resources to have multiple profiles, and when evidence of a high assurance level (a referring URL that is known to designate a specific user of a major service) to link it with other profiles that also have that designation. To me, that seems par for the course for any service that's generating profiles of browsing behavior and trying to make any sort of decisions based on it. It redu…

GitHub is always at your disposal. NV doesn’t sell the consumer cards to enterprises. So on AWS a multi-GPU box will cost you about 12 dollars an hour. If you can disambiguate, let’s just say 85% of profiles absent IP or cookies, well I think you just broke the academic SOTA and I’d love to make some calls.

Cheat sheet: you can’t.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#403

Post by EpicEng »

benreesman wrote: post #293
EpicEng wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that so much potentially sensitive data exists in a few repositories is in itself a bit foreboding. Who knows what companies will be able to glean from it one, five, or twenty years down the road? My behavior on the web being tracked by corporations with little incentive to do right by me is worrisome.

I’m more concerned that they’re designing the next version of the Web right under our noses than that they know what kind of sneakers I’m 8% more likely to buy.

I'm not thinking about ad delivery, I'm thinking about behavioral analysis. Knowing how a person thinks and acts can be a very useful weapon in the wrong hands, and FB and the like have done nothing to make me think their hands are the right ones (I don't think any are really.)

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#404

Post by benreesman »

dmitriid wrote: post #381
benreesman wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you don’t think that lawyer fees scale linearly with regulation complexity you’re either an early Uber employee or mistaken.

When you’ve built a social consumer business in Europe that is profitable after compliance, send me a term sheet.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#405

Post by p49k »

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 what's great about GDPR. It makes privacy a fundamental right that can't be bargained away, much like you can't sign a contract binding you to slavery and you can't accept a bonus from your employer in exchange from losing your mandated breaks.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#406

Post by jjeaff »

__jal wrote: post #378
stickfigure wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

I'm sure it will be mentioned in the 40 page privacy and cookie policy that pops up on every website asking you to agree before continuing.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#407

Post by w1nst0nsm1th »

jimmaswell wrote: post #276
Faark wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tor is slow if you're used to browse with a 50 MB internet connection speed.

My own connection doesn't go over 1.6MB download speed, and only if the weather is clear and I have the wind in the back.

You can now achieve a 500KB or more speed in most Tor connection, which is enough to have a confortable browsing experience, imo.

The real downside is the google captcha, which happens sometimes to even denie you to solve a captcha in the first place for web pages where there is no user input.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#408

Post by saagarjha »

benreesman wrote: post #322
saagarjha wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reeks of sour grapes that a mediocre employee at one of these places makes 3-20x what anyone makes (as a rank and file employee) anywhere else This is not an argument and moreover not even true: there are companies that pay well and don’t collect reams of data on their users.

You didn’t address my argument and unless you’ve been on more comp committees than me then I would annotate that as sources needed.

Like I said: it’s not an argument, it’s an attack. Plus I’m sure that there’d be many people here able to counter your claim regardless of the compensation number you drop.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#409

Post by saagarjha »

benreesman wrote: post #393
__jal wrote: 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 do, and I can make an informed choice. Unless your website has a very eclectic audience, I’m not the only one using your services.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#410

Post by mobjack »

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)?

An attacker can use a botnet to try to login your site from a list of username/passwords from the latest big data breach.

They will get likely access of a small percentage of those accounts and you have to do damage control.

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