SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 29 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) — Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced Turnstile, a simple, private way to replace CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) and help validate humanity across the Internet. Now any site owner can replace CAPTCHAs through a simple API, whether they’re a Cloudflare customer or not.
CAPTCHA has long been regarded as a terrible user experience that sacrifices privacy by harvesting user data. They typically come in the form of a challenge that is meant to be difficult for a computer to pass but simple for a human, such as identifying stretched letters or numbers, or things like crosswalks or stop signs. It is estimated that collectively, humans waste 500 years a day trying to solve CAPTCHAs. In addition to being the speed bump of the Internet, the tests have been critiqued for their lack of accessibility, assuming all Internet users have the physical and cognitive capabilities to solve them. Privacy is also at risk; for example, Google’s reCAPTCHA, which dominates the market, may ask for users to log in to their Google account as a form of verification. No one should have to give up private information when simply trying to prove they are not a robot. Cloudflare’s solution is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA that preserves the user’s privacy.