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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>Sounds like something I still will expect my privacy-respecting browser to block in its entirety

prepared to get penalized by recaptcha for not having it enabled.

So nothing will change then?

ReCaptcha already appears to have some grudge against me, presumably by virtue of running Firefox and comprehensive ad-blocking, so blocking yet another google thing isn't going to make my life substantially worse.

Google already penalizes non-Chrome users by showing them more ads, in particular ads for Chrome. The choice becomes more stark by the day.

May I ask what kind of setup you're running with Firefox? I'm having Firefox on a MBP with only uBlock but I rarely get any recaptcha. Am I mistaken in thinking I'm securing my privacy?

Are you logged into Google? Not on Firefox itself, just in one of their properties. I have the same setup and don’t get recaptcha either, I think it’s probably because I’m either logged into my personal long-standing gmail or my work g suite account. My guess is if I used the container stuff to isolate Google like I do Facebook then it would start triggering it.

I do get recaptcha all the time in Safari on iOS despite being logged into Google there too, not sure what that’s about.

I only login to Google in a dedicated Firefox Container, and yes I'm getting really sick of ReCaptcha. It's amazingly user hostile at this point, and I suppose that it doesn't help that I need two or three attempts at this point to "pass" its challenges, because its machine learning algorithm and I disagree on what constitutes a "street sign" or something dumb like that. It's making me want to avoid websites that use ReCaptcha challenges altogether.

On desktop: * NextDNS for DNS over Http (Mac vpn application) * Firefox + uBlock (Matrix version) * google + fb accounts live in container tabs

On mobile: * NextDNS (same app vpn setup on iOS) with aggressive blocks enabled * Safari content blocker for anything that gets missed.

Every time I get a recaptcha, it invariably turns into a multi-round affair.

Start playing around with these

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy/Privacy_Task_Force/firefox_...

Privacy comes with a price.

uBlock with all third party requests blocked. That means I don't even see recaptcha, but when I explicitly enable it for a site, it takes 3-4 rounds to pass. Logged on to gmail and youtube.

My strategy for this has been to switch to a different browser (Brave, simply because it's Chrome-ish and runs on Linux). Since the reCaptcha network has seen this browser before I'm seldom abused with more than one or two rounds of image guessing.

OTOH when I see reCaptcha-wanted websites I'm mostly inclined to just bounce. There has to be a really compelling use-case to propel me to go to all the bother.

I guess I'm lucky I'm in Europe, where the majority of sites do not use recaptcha (I think it's illegal under GDPR). A minority of sites I use try to load it, but don't care if it fails, and only a few irritating sites I would use actually require it.

Yeah, I strongly suspect this will be the result on a much scale than the edge cases we see today. We need to start punishing companies using reCaptcha. Stop doing business with them.

What is a good alternative to reCaptcha that sites should use instead?

I’ve been seeing hCaptcha more often ever since the Cloudflare announcement. Unlike with ReCaptcha, it doesn’t send me into an infinite loop.

If you browse through tor, hcaptcha can and will send you to infinite loop. Depends on the site though, not sure why...

Thank you, totally missed this alternative, will check it out!

Link for the lazy / curious: https://www.hcaptcha.com/

hCaptcha is an alternative I have seen popping up as of late.

(I am completely unaffiliated with them, and I can't really even verify whether or not hCaptcha is any good, although it did seem like it was rather decent to me and no more difficult not easier than the average reCAPTCHA)

Captcha is alrealy horrible for me because i do not use chrome, and have ublock and few other privacy addons.

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