Tell HN: Google Captcha is cancer

10 points by jackblack8989 ↗ HN
Sites abuse it and google abuses it more. I am asked to solve 5 different puzzles on every single action. It's cancerous if you're a privacy freak who doesn't store cookies

8 comments

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It's a great way to stop people from contacting you. Just pop a captcha in and your form submissions will drop dramatically.

And if you're looking for a quick way to kill conversions, just add a mandatory captcha check to the checkout. Great tool!

Just being honest, it saved me more than giving trouble as you've explained.

All my sites are secure because of it, there are trillions of spammers on the web and we need something to guard the doors.

Might I recommend using an automated CAPTCHA solver in these trying times https://github.com/ecthros/uncaptcha
Won't work.

> unCaptcha is intended to be a proof of concept. As of the time of our paper, we found it to successfully solve reCaptcha's audio challenges with 85% success. Since that time, reCaptcha appears to include some additional protections that limit unCaptcha's success. We will not be maintaining this code to be an effective attack on reCaptcha.

Not to mention you're training Google's AI with every "select photos containing a car" type question.
I wouldn't even mind if the training was placed in some sort of open dataset. Now Google is essentially appropriating some of your brain power to improve their proprietary AI.

I really wish we could go back to proofreading words that tripped up OCR, for a digitized corpus of books open to anyone.

It's also brutal if you use a well-known VPN service.