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.
This is why we have consumer protection laws
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.
maybe there is something in your particular setup that is breaking it.
This doesn't harm consumers. They are very slightly inconvenienced, likely less-so than if websites were forced to use other methods to achieve the same thing.
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.
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.
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?
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.