Security News > 2020 > April > Cloudflare dumps Google's reCAPTCHA, moves to hCaptcha as free ride ends (and something about privacy)

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 biz held a bake-off to pick a new provider, and settled on hCaptcha, a service released last year as an alternative to reCAPTCHA. According to Prince and Isasi, hCaptcha doesn't sell personal data and made commitments to use info collected from Cloudflare only to improve the service.

Finally, they note, hCaptcha works where Google services are blocked and hCaptcha was responsive - Google has never been known for attentive customer support.

The Register asked Cloudflare if it could provide data comparing how automated systems fare when trying to defeat hCaptcha and reCAPTCHA puzzles.

Khedouri expressed reluctance to release data comparing how hCaptcha and reCAPTCHA fare against automated attacks but pointed to Cloudflare's statement that "Performance was as good as or better than expected during our A/B testing."

News URL

https://go.theregister.co.uk/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/09/cloudflare_dumps_recaptcha/