alt Hacker NewsGoogle's New reCAPTCHA Wants Your Camera Access and 21 Points of Your Hand
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I saw a post on the GrapheneOS forum of someone who was accosted by Google with this requirement, so they are certainly using it.
It's interesting the parallels of Google's recaptcha and Cloudflare turnstile.
Cloudflare is free, no image selector, allows VPNs and Tor for the most part, just 0 click with a good ip reputation and 1 click with a bad one.
Recaptcha is paid, trains waymos, sucks millions of hours of human time, asks for camera access, asks for a phone attestation, blocks VPNs/Tor.
Thank god less sites are using ReCAPTCHA.
Looking forward to some other solutions gaining prominence eventually as well.
Like that Anime girl one.
Not gonna happen. Ever.
If a web requires me to do this to access it, I simply refuse.
The last time I needed some web was my electricity company - sent them a ticket with a complaint. They replied with some bs like "your browser is simply not supported" so I kept sending them the same ticket over and over again until I got a real response and it seems they decided to change the system.
To use my favorite quote: That's all it takes really, pressure, and time... :)
I can show them a finger.
And seriously - what about people without hands? What about scammers pretending to be Google gaining access to my camera? What about blind people? What about people using the site in places where camera use is not allowed?
Also worth noting this could allow Google to know who is using whom's devices. E.g. if I let my sister use my device, then Google would know it's her hand.
Would it deny her hand's reCAPTCHA because it doesn't match my biometrics? Or would it allow her and just make a record in the google database that she was using my phone at 8:42PM ?
Imagine getting your hand wrongly blacklisted as a fake, and then someday down the road you make a wrong gesture during an online interview and now your real-name is also on the suspicion list.
A few days back, Google reCaptcha suddenly showed me a QR code and asked me to scan it with my mobile to "verify" I was human. I was taken aback, and at first thought my system / browser had some malware that was messing with the Captcha ...
(Apparently, this started appearing from last month - https://cybernews.com/privacy/google-qr-code-recaptcha-requi... ).
Doesn't surprise me at all and seems like a good solution to the problem of human verification. It won't take long for AI to catch up to that, but this captcha method might hold for a couple of months.
Not sure what problem everybody here is having with this. The alternative would be device certificate stuff (ala did Apple sign for this being a proper Apple device?). Having to shake your hand sounds a lot more privacy friendly. Are you guys seriously worried that Google is gonna steal your secret handshakes?
We have to have ability to stream video instead of accepting browsers webcam request. I propose Firefox to go first with the implantation. I would like to automate it with AI to stream every time a different video with different person
I could see this being privacy friendly if the user could see exactly what Google was using.
For instance, terminalcam, gives just enough data to reveal liveness without necessarily giving enough information about identity.
Is it weird that my reaction to all of this is that I am just going to drop these websites when they ask me for this?
Just as with paywalls, it's just easier to close the page if prompted with this. Many things are not that interesting if an effort is required.
The non-mandatory internet that requires any captcha at all is becoming non-existent to me.
can a unique fingerprint (no pun intended) be extracted from hand geometry
What camera?
My openclaw agent gonna find some way around it.
I'm also now seeing a 'scan this QR code' captcha when using Archive.org links.
Can't be bothered... so instead using the accessibility option of listening to a phrase instead.
It is extremely disappointing to see Reclaim’s reporting whiff so badly on this. Yeah, they got the gist of the outrage, but they missed the real grift underneath. They slipped a massive loophole under the radar here and Reclaim misses it entirely: Google promised to delete the footage, but not the data derived from the footage. To use 23andme as an analogy, the company tended to dispose of old genetic sample kits after a while, but retained the derived data from those kits identifiably associated with specific people. Google is only promising to dispose of the costly data to store, the raw biometric material that takes up precious terabytes, but unlike 23andme will never voluntarily permit you to review and remove the results of their biometric analysis if you. Reclaim, if you’re reading this, here’s what you missed: https://docs.cloud.google.com/recaptcha/docs/hand-gesture-ve...
> Google does not retain any images or videos of a user's hand gestures
This is the sole statement of data deletion provided, and nowhere does Google state any other retention policy for derivations whatsoever, whether anonymized or associated, from that hand data; referring instead to the generic terms of service privacy policy:
> Other data is deleted or anonymized automatically
The privacy policy does not have a specific callout for biometric derivations, and so they may choose to anonymize rather than delete your biometric data.
> some data we retain for longer periods of time when necessary for legitimate business or legal purposes, such as security, fraud and abuse prevention
Recaptcha exists for the exlclusice purpose of security, fraud and abuse prevention, and so by this clause they may retain your identified hand scan biometrics for as long as they see fit.
> We will share personal information outside of Google if we have a good-faith belief that disclosure of the information is reasonabl[e]
They will give your identified hand biometrics upon request to anyone who can make a convincing case to them.
> We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners
And they grant themselves the right to start selling their dataset of humanity’s hand biometrics for personal profit with none shared back to those whose biometrics are now a commodity to be bought and sold.
(Note that Google is not alone in this; see also gestures at much of tech. But that’s no excuse for the grift going unreported by a journalistic entity that’s been around long enough to know better how these reassurance-by-omission scams work. I was already upset with Google but I still expect better of those trying to stop them.)
things are getting out of hand :D
With high resolution cameras, indefinite data retention and third party data leaks being a matter of when, not if, this seems like a perfect way to get your fingerprints stolen by organized crime syndicates worldwide. If not next year, then in 5-10 years. And when they get used for “something”, what happens when you go on vacation somewhere and you’re detained at that country’s border for a crime that happened N years before your very first entry into that country ever happened?
With as many Ph.D.s as there are at Google, you’d think they’d be smarter than to come up with this. Which is how you know the PMs are in charge, not the smart people.