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Ask HN: Excessive Number of Ebay Re:Captchas?

7 points by x14km2d ↗ HN
I just wanted to buy an Arduino programming book on Ebay and should pass a Re:Captcha at the end. After 11 Re:Captchas I canceled the purchase and ordered the book from Amazon. Has this also happened to you, that you had to fill out so many Re:Captchas?

9 comments

[ 8.7 ms ] story [ 41.6 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
Not on ebay but on other sites yes.
hulitu
A lot on yahoo lately. Need to find another email provider.
iefbr14
Never on ebay and I always cancel when I get a second one on other sites.
ZeroGravitas
Do you have any kind of browser extension installed? Does it still happen when you run a totally fresh user profile?
ratcline
Re:Captcha uses your IP and Google account to try to determine if you're a real human or a bot. If you're signed into a brand new Google account, or logged out of one, it'll be more likely to prompt for Re:Captcha.
armchairhacker
This happened on Steam before. The real issue was that I accidentally locked the reset password function, but instead of saying Steam just game me infinite captchas. I finally found my initial password.

So it’s probably blocked you for some reason, and instead of saying this it’s giving you infinite captchas.

guilhas
Web in general, yes just crazy now and then endless captchas, more than 2 or 3 I just leave it. I breath when I see other captcha brands

On eBay when I check view sold items, I get a captcha, not many times endless. Some months ago I was getting 2 different sets of captcha at login.

Annoyingly now when I click in some high level sub menus I am asked to login again on mobile web. Looks stupid

ev1
ebay uses an extremely invasive persistent tracker that also port scans your LAN through your browser, port scans localhost, loads webgl, every media plugin, canvas, etc.

if you block any of this (a default uBlock origin is enough, easyprivacy list), you are flagged heavily as fraud.

x14km2d
Yes. It's uBlock. Tx for your help.