Cloudflare Dumps Google's reCAPTCHA, Moves to hCaptcha as Free Ride Ends
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:
Cloudflare on Wednesday said it is ditching Google's reCAPTCHA bot detector for a similar service called hCaptcha out of concerns about privacy and availability, but mostly cost.
The network services biz said it initially adopted reCAPTCHA because it was free, effective, and worked at scale. Some Cloudflare customers, however, have expressed reservations about having data sent to Google.
Google's reCAPTCHA v3, used on about 1.2m websites, provides a way for web publishers to present puzzles called CAPTCHAs (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) that can usually, but not always, distinguish automated website interaction from human engagement. The point of presenting such challenges is to keep bots from registering fake accounts and conducting other sorts of online abuse.
In a blog post, CEO Matthew Prince and product manager Sergi Isasi observed that while Google is an advertising business and Cloudflare is not, Cloudflare nonetheless reconciled itself to Google's privacy policy even if it made some customers wary.
The biz also has also been concerned about the availability of reCAPTCHA in China, given that Google services are intermittently blocked there. China is home to about a quarter of the world's internet users so a significant number of people could be unable to access websites barricaded behind inaccessible reCATPCHA puzzles.
Prince and Isasi note that Cloudflare has had some issues with this in China and elsewhere. But over the past decade, this hasn't been enough to warrant action.
Finally, earlier this year, Google told Cloudflare it plans to begin charging for reCAPTCHA, a service it has previously offered for free because the answers people provide improve its services and machine learning systems.
In an email to The Register, a Google spokesperson said there's no charge for reCAPTCHA unless you exceed one million queries per month or 1,000 API calls per second.
Faced with the prospect of paying millions for a service it offered at no charge to customers, Cloudflare decided something had to be done.
"That was finally enough of an impetus for us to look for a better alternative," said Prince and Isasi.
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