What do you know about reCAPTCHA?
Seems a harmless little application; right? Let's dig in and find out, secondly it is a security apparatus.
First did you know that the Global behemoth Google owns reCAPTCHA? True, and that it is a behavior monitoring tool.
Secondly did you know that Google is an ad company, and their security products look very much like their ad products: they track user behavior on every page of a website and across the web. You might be wondering how is Google an ad company? 80% of their revenue comes from ad sources! So how is it they track behavior? Your pop-up dialog box asks you to identify 'cars' you happen to select a motorbike or motorcycle. Does this meet the criteria designed by the developer? Perhaps it does in your native language, so Google takes that data and sees how they can modify their Artificial Intelligence (aka AI) learning to allow for these nuances.
What could go wrong with Google use of reCAPTCHA? Well Google hasn't exactly been a stalwart of Privacy. If you are logged into their Application framework, well they can just tie in all that metadata (data about data) and then start mapping it specifically to you. Then they have a nearly complete understanding of what you do, where you go and potentially what you do while on those sites.
Are there any safe alternatives to reCAPTCHA? Yes, it turns out a firm called hCAPTCHA exists and already runs on 15% of the Internet. How are they different? Well like duckduckgo they believe in Privacy since day one! "s it turns out, tracking users across the web and tying their web history to their identity is completely unnecessary for achieving good security. The many companies that have switched over to hCaptcha often report equal or better performance in bot detection and mitigation despite our privacy focus." Another bonus to hCAPTCHA is they are much faster than reCAPTCHA as they are not slowing down things so they can keep up and track behaviors.
You can learn more about hCAPTHA by going here - https://www.hcaptcha.com/what-is-hcaptcha-about?site=mvnrepository.com&key=45fbc4de-366c-40ef-9274-9f3feca1cd6c&r=a1
Disclaimer - I am not an employee of hCAPTCHA, nor am I an agent of hCAPTCHA. Just want to bring an privacy angle to this shrinking world.
Stay Safe my Friends!
