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Comment by bubblehack3r | Hacker News Reader

16 points·bubblehack3r··6 comments

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FYI, this is written by one of the reCAPTCHA's competitors. Last sentence of the page:

> Check out our flagship product, Prosopo Procaptcha, if you don't want to get caught in Google's privacy nightmare

They also mention it right at the top of the article too. They aren't trying to hide it

in my professional experience it's hard to exactly comply with the cookie laws of Europe when using recaptcha.

that doesn't mean it's a "nightmare" imo - it just means it's on par with a lot of online services. it's definitely one of the more problematic legal ones within Google's portfolio. but in the real world IMO the privacy risk is minimal to actually harming anyone.

At this point I'm pretty sure that any attempt to verify someone's "humanity" is bound to be a privacy nightmare. Worse it seems it will only become more so as we get better at making computers mimic human behaviour.

There's a site that got banned from all the captcha services and switched to a homegrown proof of work system. You can tie the PoW difficulty to the level of DDoS as well so the impact is minimal when not under attack.

google itself is becoming more of a privacy mess.

More and more sites are adding google services, and it's not googletagmanager anymore, it's google.com. and with more and more sites, this is a requirement for online function.

Just a few:

www.dmv.ca.gov

www.ftb.ca.gov (ca taxes)

www.kaiserpermantente.org

www.irs.gov (hmmm... maybe not google.com )

www.gog.com (coupons)

the list goes on.

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