Over the last few weeks, reCpatcha has gotten a lot of criticism about how they track their users, I think it's good that we start raising online privacy questions more. There have also been a lot of posting about this on many Reddit forums, and this made me look a bit deeper into the alternatives we have. hCaptcha has a new approach, where a website owner can earn every time a hCaptcha is solved and you better privacy they already have millions of people using it. Is anyone here using hCaptcha? How much is Google’s bot detection really worth?
I recently started investigating reCAPTCHA alternatives, so I stumbled upon hCaptcha. I found it to be very annoying from a user perspective, even more annoying than clicking tiles in reCAPTCHA. The hCaptcha I was shown required me to mark the borders of the opening in a gate. First I wasn't quite sure what the captcha wanted me to do, and when I clicked it, a magnifying glass was displayed around the cursor to show more details, which I found distracting. So I really would suggest not to annoy your visitors with hCAPTCHa. Here is an excellent article I found that describes the problems with reCAPTCHA and discusses alternatives.
The issue I have with ReCapcha is that generally you can pass first time without solving anything if you are logged-in to Google. All this does is encourage users to stay logged-in which gives Google a significant amount of freedom over how they track users.