The other problem with this is that there are few CAPTCHA alternatives.

CF turnstile is one, but of course that means Cloudflare owns even more of the web.

HCaptcha is inaccessible and actively discriminatory against individuals with disabilities and refuses to change, to the point that I suspect the only way that they will do anything is to file a class-action against them and sue them into the ground.

And I... Can't think of anything else. Other than to just get rid of Captchas entirely.

You could just have a custom one that asks domain-specific questions (and ones which will trip up LLMs are not hard to come by.) I've seen a few forums ask such questions for registration, long before the rise of LLMs.

There are other captcha alternatives like Turnstile, for example Private Captcha, Altcha etc. - they are owned by mostly “small” independent companies, they are not visual captchas (proof-of-work based) and very accesssible.

The answer that no one likes: make it cost a nominal amount of money.

Enough to make it so bots are expensive to run.

At least in my country (Poland) you should be able to make a pretty bug fuss and resulting in them fixing it, if indeed one of ego services made you leak all your data to Google.

People do care about such things.

I hope the same is true in other EU countries.

I agree, and I think CAPTCHA is a disservice on public websites.

Compliance is what makes all that shit possible. Sadly most people are compliant and made so by gradually increasing their dependency on "commodities" which really are anchors to a shit lake.

Beautiful analogy, BTW.

Suddenly I have been made aware that, having lost my paddle on Shit Creek, I will eventually be taken downstream to Shit Lake (where it appears I will inevitably drop anchor).

Oh just wait, the AI phone service on their side will be more than happy to complete your device attestation key challenge by touch tone. We have to make sure you are still you after all!

But in all seriousness, many services are making it difficult through to impossible to communicate outside of their web or app platforms. Call centres are expensive and messy, and it's now apparently acceptable as a society to treat customers/clients/whatever as adversaries so they can get away with making it hard to communicate with them.

I was unable to book a doctors meeting through the clinic's website, so I declared "screw tech" and called their call center, which still worked better. The app just searched for the "first available spot" and never found anything. If they axe the call center I'm going to have to go to their place.

Or ask for a print out.

Fairly sure that would be considered a breach of patient confidentiality where I live, at least.

You should check your patient portal closely, they may be violating your confidentiality in ways that are much worse: https://vanguardcommunications.net/facebook-ads-pixel/

Sorry to hear that. What did people do before computers then?

Not sure how that's relevant. There are computers now. Regulations change with the times. Green lasers weren't controlled in the 1700:s either.

Are you comfortable with anybody being able to ring up the hospital and say "yo, it's majorchord, how are my gonnorhea results?"

> Are you comfortable with anybody being able to ring up the hospital and say "yo, it's majorchord, how are my gonnorhea results?"

No, that's why we have safety protocols in place. When you call a doctor they ask you for your birthdate or sometimes also a PIN/password on your account to protect your data.

How would that still be considered a breach of privacy?

Alright. I didn't know that. "Just call them" did not sound like it included any kind of authentication procedure.

But giving birthdate (available to anyone via a single query in a public database) and (sometimes?! - what?!) PIN over the phone wouldn't really be considered good enough here. Birthdate is, as I said, public knowledge. And a phone is too insecure a medium for transmitting a password.

I'm not super interested in an long argument about whether it's reasonable that this isn't considered secure or not. I'm just letting you know what reality looks like. And the reality is that "just call them" is not a solution, because such information will simply not be handed out over the phone.

That misses the point: alternatives will only be available as long as enough people uses them.

I still make and receive calls all the time to get test results from my doctor, I think tons of people still use that option.