NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has called out websites for “user abuse” when they punish those who deny tracking cookies by administering “unnecessary” captcha tests.
“Unnecessary captcha use is user abuse.”
Snowden was responding to an earlier tweet by a cryptographic and security engineering employee of Apple, Frederic Jacobs, who called out websites for penalising people who are trying to protect their privacy.
“Having a lot of reCAPTCHA prompts feels like punishment for blocking tracking cookies. If you maintain a website that uses them, you’re penalising people who are protecting their privacy,” said Jacobs.
Twitter users were quick to launch into the debate as some confirmed “it’s the worst” in reference to the practice.
Many netizens were annoyed at Google using the system to train AI via the internet users, who have had to take the test.
A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a program aimed at protecting a website from bot attacks.
It does this by testing human responses, with many versions of it installing a cookie on one’s computer.
A reCaptcha is a similar system that uses the results of the test to develop machine learning or to digitise books.