I use Firefox and Firefox Mobile on the desktop and Android respectively, Chromium with Bromite patches on Android, and infrequently Brave on the desktop to get to sites that only work properly with Chromium (more and more often - another whole separate can of worms too, this…) And I always pay attention to disable google.com and gstatic.com in NoScript and uBlock Origin whenever possible.
I noticed something quite striking: when I hit sites that use those hateful captchas from Google - aka “reCAPTCHA” that I know are from Google because they force me to temporarily reenable google.com and gstatic.com - statistically, Google quite consistently marks the captcha as passed with the green checkmark without even asking me to identify fire hydrants or bicycles once, or perhaps once but the test passes even if I purposedly don’t select certain images, and almost never serves me those especially heinous “rolling captchas” that keep coming up with more and more images to identify or not as you click on them until it apparently has annoyed you enough and lets you through.
When I use Firefox however, the captchas never pass without at least one test, sometimes several in a row, and very often rolling captchas. And if I purposedly don’t select certain images for the sake of experimentation, the captchas keep on coming and coming and coming forever - and if I keep doing it long enough, they plain never stop and the site become impossible to access.
Only with Firefox. Never with Chromium-based browsers.
I’ve been experimenting with this informally for months now and it’s quite clear to me that Google has a dark pattern in place with its reCAPTCHA system to make Chrome and Chromium-based browsers the path of least resistance.
It’s really disgusting…
Google’s ReCaptcha in version 3 works in the background. Instead of displaying images of crosswalks and such, it uses a kind of risk score. This risk score is based on user behavior: If someone has behaved like a human in the past and thus gets a low risk score, the captcha is passed without you having to do anything or even seeing it.
I assume that Google uses data from it’s own services, web analytics applications and usage data from Andoird devices and Chrome for this. Of course, this is not without its privacy issues but it’s convenient.
So, if I want to access a website, google has to collect a record about me, and only if the fucking company approve my past behavior I can access the site. Of course if I don’t have any past records I can’t (easily?) access the website. Simply awesome.
Yes, pretty much. But unlike Cloudflare DDos Protection and such Google ReCaptcha is mainly used to secure forms of all kinds (e. g. signup, login, contact or frontend posting forms).
This doesn’t factor in in my case: I only enable Google scripts to pass the reCAPTCHA. They are not enabled before or after, either on Firefox or Chromium. So in theory, regardless of the browser, Google should have no way ot tracking my behavior in the background - or if they do, the amount of tracking should be identical.
Chrome probably still collects some usage data.