According to the latest reports, Google’s reCAPTCHA is soon to be removed from millions of websites across the world. Owing to financial and privacy concerns. The reCAPTCHA service was originally meant to confirm that humans are accessing websites on the Internet and not bots. It was a method to prevent automated bots from contaminating websites. However, Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure provider has decided to remove it.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince reasoned that Google is now charging website owners in order to use the service, as a result of which, Cloudfare is having to spend a huge amount of money in order to continue it.
Cloudflare has also reported that some of its users are concerned about their data privacy while using reCAPTCHA. While it might seem that Google is only asking to tick boxes in the CAPTCHA verification process, it is also collecting data, thus strengthening its insight into user traffic.
Moving from ReCAPTCHA to hCAPTCHA. https://t.co/5I1pPAzS6M
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) April 8, 2020
Price commented on the matter, “We chose reCAPTCHA because it was effective, could scale, and was offered for free — which was important since so many of Cloudflare’s customers use our free service, But since those early days, some customers have expressed concerns about using a Google service to serve CAPTCHAs. Google’s business is targeting users with advertising. Cloudflare’s is not.”
So glad we finally pulled the trigger and made this move. https://t.co/KHvK25FhkT
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) April 8, 2020
As an alternative to ReCAPTCHA, Cloudfare will now be using hCaptcha, which will also ask you to tick boxes in order to verify if you are a human or a bot. However, Cloudflare assured that the service will only use the minimum amount of data in a transparent manner, and will not be passed on for advertisement purposes.
Till now, users of Cloudflare have given mixed responses about the hCaptcha service. While some deemed it necessary, few others termed it as extremely annoying – as they are required to complete ticking the entire grid, unlike Google’s reCaptcha.