Turnstile, a free alternative to the “terrible user experience” currently provided by CAPTCHA services used by websites to verify authentic users online, has been released by Cloudflare, a leading CDN provider.
The company claimed that its CAPTCHA replacement would also increase user privacy on the web because sites that use it would not have to provide user data to Cloudflare.
Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement will employ Private Access Tokens, which allow users on supported operating systems to have their humanity validated for them “without completing a CAPTCHA or providing personal data.”
In June 2022(opens in new tab), the company announced that iOS and macOS devices would be the first to benefit from the technology when visiting sites hosted on Cloudflare’s network.
Getting rid of CAPTCHA
Cloudflare claims to have already reduced the number of CAPTCHAs seen online by 91% by using a Managed Challenge platform that gathers more information from a web browser before deciding whether or not to serve up a CAPTCHA puzzle.
Turnstile makes this platform available to any website owner who wants to use it. Migrating from an existing CAPTCHA system, such as Google’s reCAPTCHA, which has a 98% market share. Turnstile appears to be a more equitable CAPTCHA system for several reasons.
It provides an alternative to Google’s stranglehold on CAPTCHA services for website owners, though this will have no impact on Google’s staggering popularity as a search engine, where it is free to use its reCAPTCHA technology to verify users.
Cloudflare claims that Turnstile avoids a serious privacy violation that security researchers claim Google commits with the latest version of reCAPTCHA – weighing the presence of a proprietary cookie in a browser while determining whether or not a user is malicious. It accuses Google of transferring the collected data to their ad sales business, which Google denies.
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