Think You’re Discreet Online? Think Again
Theres another downstream issue of this that many people seem to be unaware of.<p>I've gone down the road of trying to create a super private browsing experience.(www.privacytools.io for a good start).<p>The issue is the web experience degrades rapdily and quite frequently is unusable. You have to block CDNs for a start if you really wanna go full paranoia mode. And there's too many other issues to list here.<p>But the biggest issue, is that Google's CAPTCHAs become unsolveable. I mean literally they wont let you pass. You will get served a large sequence of captchas. I've experienced up to 6 for a single verification. And not only do you get more, but they deliberately add an excruciatingly slow delay to each image. It can take 10-15 seconds to solve a single image set, and then you still need to do 5 more.<p>Also interesting side note, it seems they are injecting adversial noise into the hard captcha, as I noticed faint distortions in most of the images.<p>Bur even with your best effort to solve them you will not get through. Ive repeated this experiement many times. It seems that preventing browser fingerprinting is the thing that really makes them put up a redflag, but its hard to know for sure. And I'd like to emphasize that none of the privacy modifications I was using make any significant change to normal browser functionality. You still have JS, you still have cookies (through Firefox containers).<p>Anyway the scary thing here is its very easy to extrapolate this further and get to an internet where you either opt in to be tracked,  or you are effectively throttled/gated on huge parts of the web.<p>Google CAPTCHAs have gone from asking the question "Are you human?" to "Which human are you?".<p>And the beautiful, incredible irony is how this contrasts with Google's very public stance on net neutrality.<p>"Internet companies, innovative startups, and millions of internet users depend on these common-sense protections that prevent blocking or throttling of internet traffic, segmenting the internet into paid fast lanes and slow lanes, and other discriminatory practices. Thanks in part to net neutrality, the open internet has grown to become an unrivaled source of choice, competition, innovation, free expression, and opportunity. And it should stay that way. "<p>Do as I say. Not as I do.