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Dear website owners, please, do not use reCaptcha. As was noted in other comments, Google discriminates against the users who try to protect their privacy by sh
by Fice 12y ago
Dear website owners, please, do not use reCaptcha. As was noted in other comments, Google discriminates against the users who try to protect their privacy by showing them nearly unsolvable variant. For instance, I see the hard version all the time since I started to use Privacy Badger for Firefox. It is also not impossible that they discriminate by user-agent.
And generally it is a very bad idea to choose the most popular service among the alternatives, as by doing so you are contributing to the centralization and monopolization of the Internet.
- skj 12y agoIt's almost like, if they already know you're not a bot, they don't have to try very hard to re-prove it, or something. Think of it in a Bayesian sense. If 10% of anonymous users end up being bots (the prior), and the "hard" recaptcha has a 1% false-negative (incorrectly identifying someone as a human) rate, then of the anonymous users who succeed in getting past the recaptcha, .1% will be bots (the posterior). But if 1% of sign-in users are bots (probably less than that), you only need a recaptcha with a 10% false-negative rate to achieve the same bot throughput limit. And, those users are less frustrated.
- jobigoud 12y agoWhile Google is worried by the false negative, we as users measure frustration with the false positive (failures to identify an actual human) rate. Ideally they would find a system where both rates are independent or where false positive are rare.
- skj 12y agoIdeally, yes.
- Fice 12y agoI understand how it is justified technically, but that does not invalidate the fact that reCaptcha is discriminating against the users who care about privacy.