I have been trying to browse the net with tor most of the time
recently. I have realized a worrying theme. Many sites have
captcha installed to verify you are a human. I would rather not
answer them, and often I am on text only browser as well, and
there is no captcha in text.
Most of captchas are provided by Google, and these days I am
suspicious of everything they do. I am sure that after you prove
your humanness, you are given a cookie that tracks the steps you
take until you close the browser. So, even without any other
tracking methods this would give Google an idea of what category
to put that webpage in. I mean that if I go to someone's blog,
accept the captcha, go to a prepper site afterwards and a
conspiracy site after that, now I have given Google reference
as to which box to put this blog in.
The deep problem here is that the boxes they put the sites in are
not logically sound. 99 people out of a hundred might agree that
the prepper and the conspiracy theorist belong in the same box.
So what? Why is the infrastructure of the system being built
on this sort of groupthink?
Then I realized that even my personal website had the captcha.
As I enquired about this, it became clear that the provider
didn't even understand that their firewall provider uses Google.
They also told me that this is not in violation of the GDPR,
which I actually highly doubt. Also I feel some personal
responsibility for helping Google tighten their grip on anonymity
online. Also, having the captcha everywhere they will be able
to count the number of people using it, so they will be able to
find "anonymity hotspots" online. Thus giving them leads on
where to use heavier tools.
This of course is speculation, but so far it seems to me if they
are able to collect anything, they will.
