Internet company Cloudflare has stopped using Googles reCaptcha and now uses hCaptcha instead. This is due to costs, privacy concerns and blockages of Google services in some countries. Cloudflare offers several services, such as DDoS protection and content delivery networks. These services are located between a website and its visitors. In order to determine whether traffic to customer websites originates from people or bots, Cloudflare uses captchas, among other things.
Since Cloudflare started, it has been working with Googles reCaptcha, which allows users to click on similar images, for example. “Google offered reCaptcha free of charge, in exchange for data from the service that Google uses to train its own visual identification systems,” says Matthew Prince of Cloudflare. However, some of the company’s customers had concerns about sending data to Google. In addition, Google services are blocked in some countries, including China. Users in these countries did not get to see Googles reCaptcha and could not visit the websites of Cloudflare customers.
Another important reason to stop reCaptcha is that Google is now charging money for it. According to Prince, this would cost Cloudflare millions of dollars annually. That’s why we opted for hCaptcha. This captapcha provider says it doesn’t sell personal data and only collects the minimum amount of personal data required, works in regions where Google is blocked, offers good performance and supports the browser extension Privacy Pass. In addition, the costs are much lower than Cloudflare would have lost to reCaptcha.
Despite the choice of a new captcha provider, Prince states that captchas are an “imperfect answer” to a number of tricky problems. Ultimately, Cloudflare wants to reduce the number of captchas that Internet users see and even eliminate them altogether at a later stage.
