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Take a step back and consider the owners of the websites you are visiting. They need a way to filter out spammers and decided to use captchas, which is their c

Take a step back and consider the owners of the websites you are visiting. They need a way to filter out spammers and decided to use captchas, which is their choice to do so. As a consumer, it’s your choice to not support them if you feel it has become too burdensome to fill out the captcha. The legality of this shouldn’t even be a question. No one is forcing you to use these sites.

mstipetic 6y ago
Maybe I should have been more clear in the question. I'm OK with filling out a captcha, I understand the internet is a messy place. But in this case we're literally being forced to train their neural networks for self-driving cars. I'm OK with silly captchas. Now you're opening up a bigger question of why are these massive companies that have hit on a basically infinite source of money allowed to falsely subsidise non-related industries and killing off any potential of innovation there by offering things for below-cost/free?
- mft_ 6y ago
  So you’d be okay to fill in a captcha as long as you only entered irrelevant data that didn’t have any positive meaning or effect?
  - mstipetic 6y ago
    Yes. Also, come to think of it, I'd like some assurance that I'm not being bothered more if I'm using privacy enhancing tech and basically being corralled into behaving a certain way.
    - drivingmenuts 6y ago
      You’re free to develop a better alternative and market it.
FeistySkink 6y ago
Some work-related and paid services have that, e.g. Discord, Nintendo.
lordofgibbons 6y ago
This argument falls apart as soon as you think about the power imbalance between you as a person and Google as the behemoth tech company that has tens of thousands of websites using it's captcha system. This is why we have consumer protection laws
- leesalminen 6y ago
  Google isn’t forcing these websites to use ReCaptcha. There are plenty of alternative captcha systems out there. Honestly, I don’t see how Google factors into this equation, and I’m fairly anti-Google.
  - jerry80 6y ago
    Google isn't forcing anyone to use ReCaptcha, but in my state many government websites use it. So I actually am forced to use it. This is even more true with Covid, where many in-person services have transitioned to online-only. What's worse is that ReCaptcha isn't an honest CAPTCHA. Instead, ReCaptcha relies in large part on building a tracking profile. If you take privacy enhancing measures, such as clearing cookies and using a VPN, then you can't pass ReCaptcha. It will present you with a endless loop of "please try again" no matter your answer.
    - tmottabr 6y ago
      I clean my cookies very often and do use a VPN and do not have any problem using reCaptcha, never even saw this "please try again" error. maybe there is something in your particular setup that is breaking it.
- Spivak 6y ago
  It's not really Google's power imbalance that's the issue here because Google is providing a service to the website operator. The power imbalance is because the website that uses Google's captcha system doesn't have an alternative and forces you to transact with what is essentially a 3rd party subcontractor.
- awillen 6y ago
tomc1985 6y ago
> The legality of this shouldn’t even be a question. No one is forcing you to use these sites. That argument would work if government sites didn't use reCAPTCHA in their online services. Yes, you could probably complete the process by phone but thats akin to telling people to boycott Facebook when its the place to find out about events and participate in community discussions. reCAPTCHA is EVERYWHERE. There are no viable alternatives. Asking people to boycott reCAPTCHA is asking them to boycott a huge chunk of the net. Besides, this 'think of all the poor website operators' argument is bunk. Bots are going to happen whether the operator likes it or not. Better to lean in than out.
- jitl 6y ago
  hCaptcha is very good. It’s trustworthy. For example, Cloudflare uses it. https://www.hcaptcha.com/ https://www.hcaptcha.com/
  - utucuro 6y ago
    hCaptcha makes money by using the website user as free labor. In a way, if a website is doing this instead of ads, it's better, still, getting to choose how I repay a website for content, I would prefer more control over my form of payment. Less acceptable cases exist as well, I ended up cancelling auto-payment of a service which recently started putting up an hCaptcha for every login attempt. Here's the relevant section from their website: hCaptcha is designed to solve the most labor intensive problem in machine learning: labeling massive amounts of data in a timely, affordable, and reliable way. More data generally produces better results in training machine learning models. The recent success of deep models has led to increasingly large datasets, almost always with some human review. However, creating large human-reviewed datasets via Mechanical Turk, Figure Eight, etc. is both slow and expensive. hCaptcha allows websites to make money serving this demand while blocking bots and other forms of abuse. Powered by HUMAN Protocol The hCaptcha marketplace is powered by the HUMAN Protocol, an open decentralized protocol for human review that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. Websites earn Human Tokens (HMT) whenever users use the hCaptcha widget on their site, and machine learning companies pay Human Tokens to get their data labeled.

mstipetic 6y ago

Maybe I should have been more clear in the question. I'm OK with filling out a captcha, I understand the internet is a messy place. But in this case we're literally being forced to train their neural networks for self-driving cars. I'm OK with silly captchas. Now you're opening up a bigger question of why are these massive companies that have hit on a basically infinite source of money allowed to falsely subsidise non-related industries and killing off any potential of innovation there by offering things for below-cost/free?

mft_ 6y ago
So you’d be okay to fill in a captcha as long as you only entered irrelevant data that didn’t have any positive meaning or effect?
- mstipetic 6y ago
  Yes. Also, come to think of it, I'd like some assurance that I'm not being bothered more if I'm using privacy enhancing tech and basically being corralled into behaving a certain way.
  - drivingmenuts 6y ago
    You’re free to develop a better alternative and market it.

FeistySkink 6y ago

Some work-related and paid services have that, e.g. Discord, Nintendo.

lordofgibbons 6y ago

This argument falls apart as soon as you think about the power imbalance between you as a person and Google as the behemoth tech company that has tens of thousands of websites using it's captcha system. This is why we have consumer protection laws

leesalminen 6y ago
Google isn’t forcing these websites to use ReCaptcha. There are plenty of alternative captcha systems out there. Honestly, I don’t see how Google factors into this equation, and I’m fairly anti-Google.
- jerry80 6y ago
  Google isn't forcing anyone to use ReCaptcha, but in my state many government websites use it. So I actually am forced to use it. This is even more true with Covid, where many in-person services have transitioned to online-only. What's worse is that ReCaptcha isn't an honest CAPTCHA. Instead, ReCaptcha relies in large part on building a tracking profile. If you take privacy enhancing measures, such as clearing cookies and using a VPN, then you can't pass ReCaptcha. It will present you with a endless loop of "please try again" no matter your answer.
  - tmottabr 6y ago
    I clean my cookies very often and do use a VPN and do not have any problem using reCaptcha, never even saw this "please try again" error. maybe there is something in your particular setup that is breaking it.
Spivak 6y ago
It's not really Google's power imbalance that's the issue here because Google is providing a service to the website operator. The power imbalance is because the website that uses Google's captcha system doesn't have an alternative and forces you to transact with what is essentially a 3rd party subcontractor.
awillen 6y ago

tomc1985 6y ago

> The legality of this shouldn’t even be a question. No one is forcing you to use these sites. That argument would work if government sites didn't use reCAPTCHA in their online services. Yes, you could probably complete the process by phone but thats akin to telling people to boycott Facebook when its the place to find out about events and participate in community discussions. reCAPTCHA is EVERYWHERE. There are no viable alternatives. Asking people to boycott reCAPTCHA is asking them to boycott a huge chunk of the net. Besides, this 'think of all the poor website operators' argument is bunk. Bots are going to happen whether the operator likes it or not. Better to lean in than out.

jitl 6y ago
hCaptcha is very good. It’s trustworthy. For example, Cloudflare uses it. https://www.hcaptcha.com/ https://www.hcaptcha.com/
- utucuro 6y ago
  hCaptcha makes money by using the website user as free labor. In a way, if a website is doing this instead of ads, it's better, still, getting to choose how I repay a website for content, I would prefer more control over my form of payment. Less acceptable cases exist as well, I ended up cancelling auto-payment of a service which recently started putting up an hCaptcha for every login attempt. Here's the relevant section from their website: hCaptcha is designed to solve the most labor intensive problem in machine learning: labeling massive amounts of data in a timely, affordable, and reliable way. More data generally produces better results in training machine learning models. The recent success of deep models has led to increasingly large datasets, almost always with some human review. However, creating large human-reviewed datasets via Mechanical Turk, Figure Eight, etc. is both slow and expensive. hCaptcha allows websites to make money serving this demand while blocking bots and other forms of abuse. Powered by HUMAN Protocol The hCaptcha marketplace is powered by the HUMAN Protocol, an open decentralized protocol for human review that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. Websites earn Human Tokens (HMT) whenever users use the hCaptcha widget on their site, and machine learning companies pay Human Tokens to get their data labeled.