Same box, same physical location. Chrome I get a score .2 higher then firefox, despite the fact that I never use chrome for anything...
Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
481–490 of 566 posts
Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, a clean browser and IP with the combination of what fonts I have installed, how my video card renders a canvas and WebGL instance (which may be affected not just by the video card you have, but the driver version used with it), my screen size, and a few other system level items that come through may or may or may not be enough to uniquely identify you. Along with linking to a prior profile if you screw up one tim…
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.
not much effort goes into de-duping customers? genuinely curious
I would've thought that would be a pretty useful exercise
Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Again, you’re not likely part of that group, but seriously who hangs out on HN and can’t configure a VPN? Recaptcha tracks users / devices, not IPs. A VPN won't help, it'll only lower your score. At that point: not allowing them to track you just means you can't use large parts of the web. "You don't want that GPS tracker installed into your skull? Well, we won't force you, of course, but public transportation, gov…
Wild speculative hyperbole hurts the case of people like you and I who care about doing something positive on the ground today.
Is it though? I'm somewhat lucky, because my government is generally technologically behind and loves literal paper trails, but yours isn't. Plenty of .gov sites use recaptcha. Sure, you can still visit those sites, it's just that, unless you pass a captcha test, they can't verify that you're actually a person (and not a Russian bot) and can't let you do certain things. If you want to use those government services, you need to allow Google to track you, or maybe they'll add a "sign in with Facebook" option so you have a choice.
With invisible captchas, you can't even sit down and solve a higher number of riddles to prove that you're really human and know what a fire hydrant looks like even though you look kinda strange. If Google doesn't believe that you are human, tough luck. Unless you have a personal connection or a solid Twitter following that an amplify your concerns, nobody at Google cares. Does your government care? It makes their life easier and normal citizens never really had problems with it.
DHL makes me solve a captcha to login and buy postage stamps. There probably are, or will be, public transportation companies that use recaptcha. It helps them to combat voter fraud (crime, abuse, election meddling, fake news, lots of things) if they know where (on the web, for now) you've been in the last 6 months.
You don't like the "implanting" part, because that's unrealistic? Just wait 20 years, and it may not be your head, but an RFID chip in your hand (yeah, those exist already). Until then, carry your gps tracker around and install their software on it, so it can collect data on your behavior to make sure that you're not a criminal.
Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I sorta understand the sentiment where there are tools like :
https://amiunique.org/ https://browserprint.info/
whose results would have you believe that one's footprint is very unique. I'd be interested in hearing more about why this is hard to implement into an efficient process.
Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I enjoyed reading what you said as a different perspective on the backend of ad technology vs privacy up until this comment thread. I didn't build a profitable social consumer business in Europe after compliance, but I was part of a team that implemented compliance for a long existing company within the US due to them having clients and client's clients in Europe. They're profitable. Do you want my term sheet? Or are…
What do you estimate the implementation costs of GDPR are? I've seen some research that put the numbers in the 10's of billions IIRC
It feels like a regulatory moat for the big players who can afford it. Sorta like a complex VAT policy.
Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
#486You 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.
Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
#487I'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 cookie actually is a pretty good indicator of humanity?
That's nonsense. Tons of people do. There's LOADS of great research on captcha that isn't implemented by any vendor. The roadblock is that NO ONE WANTS TO, because it's a thankless, unprofitable task that puts you dead in the crosshairs of a ton of very organized people who will devote huge resources to circumventing or breaking your offering.
"A land grab," sure. Of a nuclear wasteland covered in small arms battles.
Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
#488Earlier 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.
> It is only a negotiation if I know it is there.
You're not going to get through a site with a properly implemented captcha just by blocking it.
Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
#489> Google encouraging site admins to put reCaptcha all over their sites
hahah, wow. Put this tracking software suit on every page please - it's for your own good!
I used to kinda believe in Accelerationism[1] - philosophy where you encourage and accelerate flawed systems to promote a breaking point. However it turns out our society doesn't really have a breaking point.
Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
#490Earlier 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…
> 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?
It is small comfort for the average user, but the way you do it is use noscript. It makes the web awful, sure, but it won't happen to you.
> It doesn't even matter if I have an account on Google or Facebook, they'll create profiles for me aggregating my data anyway.
I sort of wonder what you envision this actually meaning. If I spam your website and you add a DoS filter for my IP, should I complain you made a profile of me? If when a user tries to log in I check the referrer to see if it contains a proper URL, have I violated your privacy?