cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/41362413

After meticulously shopping out something and filling a cart I went to “checkout” to pay for my order. Then, out of the pure fucking blue, the merchant pushed a broken hCAPTCHA at that moment. Apparently the merchant does not understand that it’s suppliers who serve customers, not the other way around.

WTF are they thinking.. that forcing thousands of their own customers to do some uncompensated labor will somehow magically prevent orders from criminals who not only have valid card numbers but also have everything needed to authenticate with a payment processor? If a criminal has enough good info to pass a payment system’s authentication procedure, then a CAPTCHA is not going to stop them. CAPTCHA is an /attempt/ (at best) to stop spam, not to prevent wire fraud.

Naive web devs are arbitrarily sticking CAPTCHAs anywhere and everywhere, without thinking. And it works! Why -- because consumers are pushovers. You can thank your fellow boot-licking pushover consumers for serving as enablers of the anti-human practice of reckless arbitrary CAPTCHA pushing.

After abandoning my shopping cart (as self-respecting consumers do), there was nothing to compensate me for my lost time. The shop’s robot wasted my (human) time by not informing me in advance that they would push a CAPTCHA.

It’s just like cashless Danish and Dutch shops that fail to post that cash is refused on their front door, so cash-paying consumers waste time in the shop before discovering the exclusivity of the merchant only at the time payment is demanded.

So new rule:

All websites that push CAPTCHAs must prominantly disclose on all webpages on their website that they do so. The disclosure must follow a standard format of disclosure in a font size that exceeds a legal minimum. They must also add some standard metadata so that pro-human search engines can downrank such sites appropriately. Violators must pay a statutory penalty to visitors: $50 per CAPTCHA barrier encountered per user, and an additional $50 per puzzle solved.