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Tell HN: In NSW, if Google doesn't track you, you can't pay Public School fees
I have recently enabled the "resistFingerprinting" option in Firefox[1], in order to prevent tracking based on browser fingerprinting. However I have found out that once I've done that, Google's reCAPTCHA becomes almost impossible to solve.
Normally I wouldn't care too much about Google, the problem is that in Australia, reCAPTCHA is used by Westpac bank, for processing payments on behalf of the Department of Education of New South Wales. In other words, you can't pay your child's public school fees online, unless you agree to Google tracking you.
How to test:
create a form with reCAPTCHA or just use a pre-existing one like [2], then try and solve the reCAPTCHA while resistFingerprinting is set to false (default setting)[1]. Now change it to true, and try to solve the reCAPTCHA once again.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-against-fingerprinting https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-agai...
[2] https://patrickhlauke.github.io/recaptcha/ https://patrickhlauke.github.io/recaptcha/
- treerock 8y agoTried enabling the resistFingerprinting option, and while it was (even more) annoying, it wasn't impossible. Seemed to require one or two additional screens. The slowly fading images are really frustrating, but I get hit with them normally. I'm also curious about how this works internationally. Surely not everyone know what a 'crosswalk' looks like.
- badrabbit 8y agoGoogle tracks you anways. Do that in a VM over a dedicated vpn. The problem is legal,your local law needs to prohibit non-consent user tracking of any form.
- polskibus 8y agoDid you file a complaint?
- chris_wot 8y agoTo whom?
- icebraining 8y agoThe Department of Education of New South Wales, I assume.
- swalladge 8y agoGoogle reCaptcha is one of the most pervasive nasty tracking devices because legitimate sites use it for its advertised spam protection without caring about anything else. Suddenly you have Google able to track you on Government sites (like opting out of myhealthrecord), Banks, Exchanges, and a myriad of others. I hate it because they make you choose between letting Google track you fully, letting Google track you only a bit and spend forever trying to solve the captcha (ie if you are logged out of google or have tracking protection on), or not using the service at all. :|
- hrrsn 8y agoEven the UX of reCaptcha has seriously gone downhill recently. I wonder how many hours per week I spend clicking pictures of busses and traffic lights. I would rather pay than complete them at this point.
- dagw 8y agoI wonder how many hours per week I spend clicking pictures Where are you running into this problem. I spend an embarrassing amount of time online and I'd probably estimate that I average around 1 minute a month "clicking pictures"
- aembleton 8y agoIf you were to pay, then you'd have to enable Google cookies to know that you've made the payment. If you enable Google cookies for those sites then you don't have to deal with the reCaptcha (as much).
- expertentipp 8y agoGoogle’s reCaptcha must die. I’m not training your AI, Google.
- oferzelig 8y agoI don't get your argument. I get the original post's argument of not willing to be tracked by Google, but what hurts you so much in training Google's AI?
- ForHackernews 8y agoYou're doing work for them for free. It's unpaid Mechanical Turking.
- tehlike 8y agoDevils advocate: you are getting access to a service that uses google's assistance for spam or abuse protection, not entirely unpaid.
- thomersch_ 8y agoNo, the company that integrates it makes me pay (by doing work for google)
- tehlike 8y agoEither way, you train ai and watch ads in exchange for content.
- xypher 8y agoAgain, worthy trade off, not much of a work to solve one recaptcha, and the service that you use remains available more reliably by filtering out spam bots that could potentially render it out of service otherwise.
- Flavius 8y ago
- ForHackernews 8y agoAre there any good alternatives to reCAPTCHA? If I remember correctly, it started as an academic/nonprofit from Carnegie Melon to digitize books, but then somehow got acquired by Google. Have any academic groups looked at offering a replacement?
- lwansbrough 8y agoComputer puzzles are dead. AI is too good. Anomaly detection is the future. Track your users’ behaviour yourself, find outliers, handle them appropriately.
- expertentipp 8y agoThe web has become fraudsters against bots, leaving humans excluded. The few humans left on the web are hugged to death by ad and tracking networks.
- alias_neo 8y agoSounds like some dystopian policy to undermine non-compliance in the general population. Someone should write a fiction on it.
- Rjevski 8y agoRepost of my comment above: "Squiggly letters" captchas are still fine. There's a lot of FUD around AI & ML breaking them but I have yet to find an off-the-shelf tool that can break them; and so do the spammers. Sure, you might break them if you pay a team of computer vision scientists for a few months but that isn't profitable for spammers, so even though they are technically breakable, in practice they're still good enough to thwart spam & bruteforce.
- mih 8y agoI hope Firefox turns this option on by default. Overnight millions will face a hard time with reCAPTCHA and Google might be forced to sit up and take note. Fantasy aside, people will simply switch to Chrome-based browsers contributing to Firefox's dwindling market share. A win-win situation for Google. Most Google products provide me services in exchange for tracking me, offering a reasonable compromise. With reCAPTCHA, they exploit me as an unpaid worker helping classify and train their ML algorithms, cost me time and wreck privacy leaving Google and the captcha hosting website as the only beneficiaries. Google in this case is more like a corrupt gatekeeper preventing you from entering the town. The town can employ more friendly options, but they don't care as long as the undesirables are kept at bay. For those who have experience with using reCAPTCHA, is it so easy to setup and deploy that more and more sites are switching to them? Are there no decent non-exploitative alternatives which are tough on bots but solvable in reasonable time for humans without being a test of patience?
- icebraining 8y ago> I hope Firefox turns this option on by default. Unfortunately, it has side-effects like disabling site-specific zoom levels[1], since it can be used as a fingerprinting mechanism. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1369357 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1369357
- hkai 8y agoMillions? Firefox will have less than 1% market share next year. It really doesn't matter at all, especially now that even Edge is switching to chromium.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoless than 1% next year, it was just less than 9%. Do you mean it will drop 8 percentage points in less than 1 month, or in 12 months? Even so I think you will find there is some core percentage it won't drop below as long as it is competitive with other browsers. I'm think at worst - 5%;
- 8y ago
- gagan2020 8y agoI think that's why they removed their motto of "Don't be evil". [https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/254019/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/2540...] Google is now what Microsoft use to be. And, Developers like me end up hating Microsoft for everything.
- pvg 8y agoThis isn't what 'Show HN' is for. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
- majewsky 8y ago"Tell HN" would've been more appropriate.
- pvg 8y ago"Tell HN" is kind of implied in every post and comment.
- mastazi 8y agoSorry, I actually realised that shortly after posting but it was too late to edit, thanks to the mods for rectifying.
- pvg 8y agoYou can just email them if you need something edited or fixed, they're set up with email in their cages so they're quite responsive.
- stockkid 8y agoAs someone that lives in NSW, I find this to be very sad and distressing. You should complain to Westpac and the government to let them know that this is not okay.
- beagle3 8y agoCan you file a legal challenge? You are being forced to do for-profit work, for a for-profit company, to pay your pubblic school fees. Sure, it's just 1 cent worth of work in the grand scheme of things - but the distance from zero to anything is much larger than the distance between 1 cent and 1 dollar. That's something that courts dislike much more than any tracking.
- rdbell 8y agoI wish EFF or some other privacy advocate would start making a fuss about recaptcha. Recaptcha will often make you retry multiple times despite obviously correct answers. It really feels like Google is punishing users for trying to opt-out of their data collection.
- xte 8y agoI do not know how Australian's law say, but fortunately in France all I need is taking a small screenshot or video, publish somewhere and phone (at least for now ANY public administration have human-operated public phone services) signaling a problem. At this point normally other's take the potatoes and work for me as they should being civil servant's... However I fear a future in witch Windows scenario of the '90s replicate tomorrow with websites and that's far worse since actual IT grow rate and general situation...
- ykevinator 8y agoI hope someone launches a captcha cracker soon as an extension.
- trumped 8y agoI was able to solve it with "resistFingerprinting" set to true but I had to unblock Google's domains in uMatrix and it took 3 submissions. I really dislike companies that use Google's reCAPTCHA...
- shard972 8y agoIs there any decent alternatives to reCaptcha?
- sublupo 8y agoand don't think about doing that while in a country where you don't know their native language. The challenge that Google gives you will be in that language, with no way to change it to English