Cloudflare move to hCaptcha instead of using reCAPTCHA

Cloudflare has been migrated from Google’s reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha. Cloudflare claims that reducing its reliance on Google services can enhance privacy and provide more flexible custom robot inspection procedures. reCAPTCHA was originally a research project of Carnegie Mellon University. After the acquisition of this project, Google provided it as a free service to customers.

“Cloudflare Schriftzug und Wolken-Logo, vergrößert dargestellt unter einer Lupe”by verchmarco is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Because Google’s business model is advertising, collecting user data has increasingly raised privacy concerns. In addition, Cloudflare’s customers are all over the world, but in China and other regions, Google’s services are blocked. Privacy and blocking are two major challenges in using Google services. Cloudflare chose hCaptcha after evaluating different alternative services. The reasons include

1) they don’t sell personal data; they collect only minimum necessary personal data, they are transparent in describing the info they collect and how they use and/or disclose it, and they agreed to only use such data to provide the hCaptcha service to Cloudflare;

2) performance (both in speed and solve rates) was as good as or better than expected during our A/B testing;

3) it has a robust solution for visually impaired and other users with accessibility challenges;

4) it supported Privacy Pass to reduce the frequency of CAPTCHAs;

5) it worked in regions where Google was blocked; and

6) the hCaptcha team was nimble and responsive in a way that was refreshing.