Cloudflare dumps Google's reCAPTCHA, moves to hCaptcha as free ride ends
Found on The Register on Friday, 10 April 2020
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.
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.
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. Also, they said the service performs well and has options for the visually impaired and those with other accessibility concerns.
reCaptcha is getting really bad. Long loading times plus countless retries to select all traffic lights, crosswalks, fire hydrants and whatever even though you selected the correct squares.