Bicycles And Traffic Lights No More? Tech Company Tests New Security System To Replace CAPTCHA

Web services and security company Cloudflare is testing Turnstile, a web technology that would change online security.

What is Cloudflare bringing to the table? It would eliminate CAPTCHA prompts.

The San Francisco-based company announced the project Wednesday and weeks ahead of its Cloudflare Connect conference in October.

Today, we’re announcing the open beta of Turnstile, an invisible privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA. Anyone, anywhere on the Internet, who wants to replace CAPTCHA on their site, will be able to call a simple API to do just that. https://t.co/UkUay00nkj #BirthdayWeek🎂
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) September 28, 2022

CAPTCHA prompts, a ubiquitous part of the Internet, are used to separate bots from human users.

According to Cloudflare, and as many internet users can testify, CAPTCHA has a poor user experience design. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's co-founder and CEO is hopeful of the project's impact in transforming the online experience.

A better Internet is one without you training Google’s visual machine learning algorithms on what a traffic light looks like. https://t.co/KqJCG1hGKj
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) September 28, 2022

According to the company, interactive CAPTCHA puzzles, which can take 32 seconds on average to solve, waste a critical resource: human brain cycles. Design flaws aside, CAPTCHA has another problem: privacy. While CAPTCHA is a means to verify one's identity, the technology is ripe for collection of browsing data and online history. Nearly 97% of websites use Google's reCAPTCHA, which launched in 2007.

Google's privacy policy states "we also allow specific partners to collect information from your browser or device for advertising and measurement purposes using their own cookies or similar technologies."

Taking that into account, the tech giant's data practices around CAPTCHA remain unclear. Cloudflare is touting Turnstile as "a user-friendly, privacy preserving alternative" to existing technologies.

When CAPTCHA was first introduced, it was based on the premise of distinguishing humans from bots in an early machine-learning exercise. However, recent advances in AI have meant the technology can be easily bypassed by bots.

Cloudflare's latest endeavor is not the first time it has taken on CAPTCHA. Last year, the company launched its "Private Access Tokens," which it said would remove CAPTCHA prompts on iPhone and Mac devices. The company also cut its ties with Google reCAPTCHA in 2020.

In its latest financial report, Cloudflare said its revenues totaled $193.6 million, an increase of 54% from 2021.