this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Who owns the implementation of this? Is this something that websites opt into and add to their own site? Or is this something that Google injects when you're clicking a search result on Google?
Yes.
reCAPTCHA is google's "anti-abuse" service which many websites use to ~~prevent~~ slightly increase the cost of operating automated crawlers (which somewhat ironically google operates one of the largest of itself, for their search engine).
Before neural networks could solve CAPTCHAs reliably, spammers were solving them with human labor; solving services like
anti-captcha.com(intentionally not a clickable link...) today use a mixture of automated and human solvers.In the future google is apparently building, solving services will need farms of able-to-run-a-recent-android-release mobile devices with some kind of trusted computing hardware, each one of which they'll have to use sparingly enough to keep usage of its unique ID under some plausibly-human threshold.
And even if you do have a phone and are willing to identify yourself with it, if it is too old to run a recent enough Android you also will sometimes be denied services for being unable to pass a robots' "human" test.
🤮