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things are getting out of hand :D
Imagine getting your hand wrongly blacklisted as a fake, and then someday down the road you make a wrong gesture during an online interview and now your real-name is also on the suspicion list.
Or Palantir films your hands while trying to enter a venue, border, or voting booth.
What if you don't have a cam or a hand?
There will be an Accessibility options? hear a phrase and repeat it or similar
What if you have all that, but waving is problematic due to non-functional motor control?
You are then our of the normal probability distribution and out of luck, it's not profitable to cater for you for the company.
I could see this being privacy friendly if the user could see exactly what Google was using.

For instance, terminalcam, gives just enough data to reveal liveness without necessarily giving enough information about identity.

https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/terminalcam

Well, create a virtual camera device with 120x80 resolution and give Ggl access to that and only that.
The non-mandatory internet that requires any captcha at all is becoming non-existent to me.
I saw a post on the GrapheneOS forum of someone who was accosted by Google with this requirement, so they are certainly using it.

It's interesting the parallels of Google's recaptcha and Cloudflare turnstile.

Cloudflare is free, no image selector, allows VPNs and Tor for the most part, just 0 click with a good ip reputation and 1 click with a bad one.

Recaptcha is paid, trains waymos, sucks millions of hours of human time, asks for camera access, asks for a phone attestation, blocks VPNs/Tor.

Thank god less sites are using ReCAPTCHA.

Looking forward to some other solutions gaining prominence eventually as well.

Like that Anime girl one.

Cloudflare allows you to pass with 1 click? I had as many as 10 minutes of solving capchas on ot before turning away

I'm pretty sure, Cloudflare capchas could be endless

CloudFlare captcha blocks my Opera Mobile unless I switch the user agent back to mobile.
> just 0 click with a good ip reputation and 1 click with a bad one.

Or it goes on forever without passing, which can also happen, and then you simply can't proceed. It also really does not work over TOR in my experience.

I've had it happen a bunch of times, but Recaptch usually falls back to the image challenge if I can't pass V3. It might force me to solve several of them, but it eventually lets me pass.

Cloudflare routinely denies me access to many websites - I get "turn on javascript and cookies" and then get an "old browser" denial.

I even get "Sorry." on HN a lot.

can a unique fingerprint (no pun intended) be extracted from hand geometry
Doesn't surprise me at all and seems like a good solution to the problem of human verification. It won't take long for AI to catch up to that, but this captcha method might hold for a couple of months.

Not sure what problem everybody here is having with this. The alternative would be device certificate stuff (ala did Apple sign for this being a proper Apple device?). Having to shake your hand sounds a lot more privacy friendly. Are you guys seriously worried that Google is gonna steal your secret handshakes?

Well, actually I am worried about it. It needs to happen just once. Or for google to have a different kind of CEO (as companies are wont to).
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Finding additional ways to waste more of people’s time on the web isn’t a good solution to anything. Doing so in a privacy invading way from a company that has a vested interest in collecting as much data as possible, exhausting all utility from it and butters its bread in an industry which specifically is built around disrespecting the time of other people is just never going to fly.

Like seriously, if I have to turn on a camera to get through a recaptcha then the website doing it can fuck right the hell off with extreme prejudice. My web browser is not allowed to access my cameras for any reason, no exceptions.

>this captcha method might hold for a couple of months

So stripping away user privacy even more is justified for implementing an already obsolete verification method?

Is it okay if I show my penis. I've checked and the fingerprint scanner also registers my ballsack correctly.
I get why they're doing this. They're out of options, and nobody here has proposed something better. But I'm not out of options, I'll just choose not to use any website that asks for this.

Would also accept having to pay a small amount of cryptocurrency to use a site/service, but that's only suitable for DDoS or mass bot protection, not proof of being human.

> Are you guys seriously worried that Google is gonna steal your secret handshakes?

Do I really think Google will retain that information for "debugging purposes", and 2 or 10 or 20 years from decide to make a service that identifies me from my hand biometrics because it will make them more money than the class action will cost them? Yes.

Is it weird that my reaction to all of this is that I am just going to drop these websites when they ask me for this?
I've already dropped sites/services where annoyance-invasion/usefulness ratio is above 50% but I'm afraid it will be unavoidable in some cases.

At least I know what kind of hand gesture they will get first :)

Not really.

I closed and walked away from a long standing account with HSBC when they introduced a requirement in their app for me to have Google Keyboard installed and active as my primary keyboard rather than my own one that I knew wouldn't send my keypresses to Google.

Sometimes all we need is the final push from them declining your business unless you jump through their hoops to agree that it's not worth your time.

With high resolution cameras, indefinite data retention and third party data leaks being a matter of when, not if, this seems like a perfect way to get your fingerprints stolen by organized crime syndicates worldwide. If not next year, then in 5-10 years. And when they get used for “something”, what happens when you go on vacation somewhere and you’re detained at that country’s border for a crime that happened N years before your very first entry into that country ever happened?

With as many Ph.D.s as there are at Google, you’d think they’d be smarter than to come up with this. Which is how you know the PMs are in charge, not the smart people.

I wonder if anyone has thought about what happens if and when Google (or others) gets bought out.

No firm lasts forever.

I'm also now seeing a 'scan this QR code' captcha when using Archive.org links.

Can't be bothered... so instead using the accessibility option of listening to a phrase instead.

It is extremely disappointing to see Reclaim’s reporting whiff so badly on this. Yeah, they got the gist of the outrage, but they missed the real grift underneath. They slipped a massive loophole under the radar here and Reclaim misses it entirely: Google promised to delete the footage, but not the data derived from the footage. To use 23andme as an analogy, the company tended to dispose of old genetic sample kits after a while, but retained the derived data from those kits identifiably associated with specific people. Google is only promising to dispose of the costly data to store, the raw biometric material that takes up precious terabytes, but unlike 23andme will never voluntarily permit you to review and remove the results of their biometric analysis if you. Reclaim, if you’re reading this, here’s what you missed: https://docs.cloud.google.com/recaptcha/docs/hand-gesture-ve...

> Google does not retain any images or videos of a user's hand gestures

This is the sole statement of data deletion provided, and nowhere does Google state any other retention policy for derivations whatsoever, whether anonymized or associated, from that hand data; referring instead to the generic terms of service privacy policy:

> Other data is deleted or anonymized automatically

The privacy policy does not have a specific callout for biometric derivations, and so they may choose to anonymize rather than delete your biometric data.

> some data we retain for longer periods of time when necessary for legitimate business or legal purposes, such as security, fraud and abuse prevention

Recaptcha exists for the exlclusice purpose of security, fraud and abuse prevention, and so by this clause they may retain your identified hand scan biometrics for as long as they see fit.

> We will share personal information outside of Google if we have a good-faith belief that disclosure of the information is reasonabl[e]

They will give your identified hand biometrics upon request to anyone who can make a convincing case to them.

> We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners

And they grant themselves the right to start selling their dataset of humanity’s hand biometrics for personal profit with none shared back to those whose biometrics are now a commodity to be bought and sold.

(Note that Google is not alone in this; see also gestures at much of tech. But that’s no excuse for the grift going unreported by a journalistic entity that’s been around long enough to know better how these reassurance-by-omission scams work. I was already upset with Google but I still expect better of those trying to stop them.)

Not gonna happen. Ever.

If a web requires me to do this to access it, I simply refuse.

The last time I needed some web was my electricity company - sent them a ticket with a complaint. They replied with some bs like "your browser is simply not supported" so I kept sending them the same ticket over and over again until I got a real response and it seems they decided to change the system.

To use my favorite quote: That's all it takes really, pressure, and time... :)

If a web requires me to do this to access it, I simply refuse.

A friend of mine recently tried to get a payment from an insurance policy. But the New York Life web site wouldn't work right.

She ended up talking to someone on the phone eventually and they told her it's her fault, because Safari isn't supported. Only Chrome and Edge.

Her choice was to install Chrome, or walk away from $35,000.

You may "just refuse," but she installed the browser and got her money.

Just as with paywalls, it's just easier to close the page if prompted with this. Many things are not that interesting if an effort is required.
We have to have ability to stream video instead of accepting browsers webcam request. I propose Firefox to go first with the implantation. I would like to automate it with AI to stream every time a different video with different person
Also worth noting this could allow Google to know who is using whom's devices. E.g. if I let my sister use my device, then Google would know it's her hand.

Would it deny her hand's reCAPTCHA because it doesn't match my biometrics? Or would it allow her and just make a record in the google database that she was using my phone at 8:42PM ?

A few days back, Google reCaptcha suddenly showed me a QR code and asked me to scan it with my mobile to "verify" I was human. I was taken aback, and at first thought my system / browser had some malware that was messing with the Captcha ...

(Apparently, this started appearing from last month - https://cybernews.com/privacy/google-qr-code-recaptcha-requi... ).

I have neither hands nor webcam nor phone.

Whatdo?

----

This post is hypothetical sarcasm... only two of the above are truthful.

I can show them a finger.

And seriously - what about people without hands? What about scammers pretending to be Google gaining access to my camera? What about blind people? What about people using the site in places where camera use is not allowed?

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All they're getting from me is a middle finger
Nope, I just won't use whatever websites implement this.