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Comment by gaieges | Hacker News Reader

> Google's reCaptcha code seemed to be very keen on knowing my 'cadence' or the way I used my mouse and how quickly (or how slow) I completed the captcha. It also looked at things like timezone, screen resolution, battery charge level etc So they could determine if it was 'you' who was using the captcha, soon after, in a separate session (even on a different device!)

I'd bet a good amount that they store that along with all the other personally identifying info they have on you (and google of course has a massive amount of that); which is basically why after a single reCAPTCHA solve, you wont see them prompt you again for ages - they know who you are.

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Just turn on "Resist Fingerprinting" in Firefox and you'll find ReCAPTCHA _really_ annoying! I have to solve 3-5 "panes" of a ReCAPTCHA on _every_ page... It's very annoying that preserving privacy comes with this cost.

I almost want to just add a "DeathByCaptcha" extension to handle these for me and pay a few cents for every page I visit, lol

> It's very annoying that preserving privacy comes with this cost.

It doesn't necessarily have to if Google supported privacy pass like hcaptcha does. The problem is that they don't.

Why would they? Supporting privacy-preserving options is not within their business interests.

It's way cheaper than that, you'll pay significantly less than a cent for each captcha.

It's not a cost. Google doesn't want you to protect your privacy from them. It's a punishment.

> which is basically why after a single reCAPTCHA solve, you wont see them prompt you again for ages - they know who you are.

If only. If the same site has reCaptcha across more than one page, within mere minutes of having to slog through multiple screens of one, I can guarantee I'll be doing it again.

And I'm never sure if Google has served me either a very long sequence of reCaptchas, or whether they've decided I'm not a person and are serving me an infinite reCaptcha.

I'm guessing that the comment you're responding to uses Chrome/ium, and that you don't.

Being on a VPN, have blockers on, or not logged into google are a few things that will increase the captchas you’ll see.

Also using a screen-reader and using anything other than Chrome.

Add "running Firefox" to that list.

And that's how you know that your VPN and adblockers work :)

Just looked on Takeout and there don't seem to be any reCAPTCHA data there. I wonder what a GDPR request would produce.

That is an investigative blog post I would like to read too.

Someone on here has tried to get all their data from both Facebook and Google. I wish I could find the blog post. The tech companies are claiming their Takeout/equivalent is sufficient under the GDRP and anything extra we ask for is not being provided due to it being "non user understandable" or in a "machine format". IIRC.

That's still their data though, no?

reCAPTCHA only needs to make a determination that the user is some human, not that they are any particular human. And reCAPTCHA is usable without being logged into Google’s identity system. The profiles it builds are clearly not associated with Google’s primary identity database, and its trivial if you don’t need to preserve identity to one-way hash every piece of data that GDPR considers user-identifying at the entry point to the system and store only the hash. The EU isn’t shy about handing out billion-dollar fines to Google, so while Google can match a user to a stored profile there’s no reason to suspect that Google has a way to reverse that mapping.

ReCaptcha seems to use your logged-in status (and, I’d guess, account reputation), along with an ip reputation score when deciding whether to serve a captcha or not.

A GPDR request naming an IP address should allow them to provide those scores.

If not, it’s easily demonstrable that they are storing and using information that they’re not including in a GPDR response, and they deserve their multi-billion dollar fine.

Also, ReCaptcha’s behavior is obviously anticompetitive, and also using Google’s dominant positions in some markets to establish dominance in unrelated markets.

This is anti-trust lawyer candy.

Logged in status and account reputation are obviously useful input, but reCAPTCHA objectively works without requiring login. IP reputation also obviously makes sense to take into account, but the fact that Google collects all of this fingerprinting information demonstrates that’s again only a part of what factors in. The same profile can show up from behind a different IP.

Not sure what you’re getting at about GDPR and IP reputation. GDPR says that an IP address is PII if it can be associated with an individual, but that doesn’t mean an IP address is a “subject” for the purpose of filing an Article 15 Data Subject Access Request. And it doesn’t mean that stored information that is keyed by an IP address is personal data, even if the IP address can be associated back to a particular individual.

I also find it strange that you’re talking about reCAPTCHA being “anti-trust candy” in the comments of an announcement about how a different captcha service now handles 15% of the entire internet.

>GDPR says that an IP address is PII if it can be associated with an individual, but that. . . doesn’t mean that stored information that is keyed by an IP address is personal data, even if the IP address can be associated back to a particular individual.

Okay, I’m usually pretty good at understanding law, but this doesn’t make sense to me. This seems like a very shallow, arbitrary definition of subject data. So GDPR didn’t grant ownership of one’s PII? What did it grant ownership of? I’m very confused by this.

A subject (a person) can make a request for subject data (data about the person) that a company has stored. The data has to be about the person and associatable with the person to be covered by GDPR. If I keep track of say, average CPU time for handling requests from a particular IP address, the CPU metric doesn’t become the personal data of the individual that is associated with the IP address.

That's no secret, ... that's exactly how it is supposed to work.

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