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Google’s reCAPTCHA service, which tries to verify whether you’re human or bot, is being removed from millions of websites due to cost and privacy issues.
The decision comes from Cloudflare, a leading Internet infrastructure provider serving 26 million websites. For years, the company has been using reCAPTCHA to prevent automated robots and other malicious actors from abusing customer websites.
But on Wednesday, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the company was abandoning the service in part because Google is now charging website owners for using it. “In our case, that would have added millions of dollars in annual costs just to continue using reCAPTCHA for our free users,” Prince wrote in a blog post.
At the same time, Cloudflare’s own customers are concerned about the privacy implications of using reCAPTCHA. Google’s service is perhaps best known for asking you to choose the correct objects in an image grid.
Test reCAPTCHA asking it to choose the correct objects
However, reCAPTCHA also works by collecting data from your computer, which gives Google insight into user traffic. Over the years, the view has gotten bigger as more websites have adopted reCAPTCHA to stop spammers.
“We chose reCAPTCHA because it was effective, scalable, and offered for free, which was important since many of Cloudflare’s customers use our free service,” said Prince. “(But) since those early days, some customers have expressed concern about using a Google service to serve CAPTCHA. Google’s business targets users with advertising. Cloudflare is not.
To fill the gap, the company has decided on an alternative, called hCaptcha. It will also ask you to choose objects in an image grid to test whether it is a human or a bot. However, you won’t have to worry about data ending up in the hands of an advertising technology giant.
HCaptcha test example.
“They collect only the minimum necessary personal data, are transparent in describing the information they collect and how they use and / or disclose it, and agreed to use only such data to provide the hCaptcha service to Cloudflare,” Prince said.
In fact, Cloudflare has decided to pay hCaptcha for the service. “While that has imposed some additional costs, those costs were a fraction of what reCAPTCHA would have. And in return, we have a much more flexible CAPTCHA platform and a much more responsive team, ”he added.
According to Cloudflare, hCaptcha should also work as well as Google’s reCAPTCHA service, or even better. But not everyone agrees. Opinion on the Cloudflare forum is mixed on the change.
“HCaptcha is really annoying,” wrote one user. “With Google captcha you would almost never have to complete the image selection challenge, and if you did, the challenge would be easier and faster to complete.”
But others support change. “Companies like Google sell user data and hCaptcha is a great alternative. Privacy is important and Cloudflare as a privacy support company shouldn’t be using ReCaptcha anywhere, “wrote another user.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, the company has previously said that user behavior data collected from reCAPTCHA is only used for security purposes.
