hCaptcha: A captcha service that respects personal data

If you know how important captchas are for securing access to certain parts of your site (and preventing automated scripts from poking around), you also know that they raise a user data protection issue.

If you want to learn more about captchas, go read our article on their creation and evolution over time!

Google's solution, reCaptcha, is still the most powerful, but it's also under the CNIL's scrutiny for its intensive collection of user data for tracking purposes.

Fortunately, there's a GDPR-compliant alternative that respects users...

hCaptcha

hCaptcha is a service that looks exactly like reCaptcha, except that it doesn't exploit user data!

But how do they manage that?

hCaptcha's business model is to offer their basic service for free, and to charge companies that need additional features!

That's what's called a viable and healthy business model!

Pros and cons

The service's advantages far outweigh its drawbacks, but here's a summary to help you get an idea:

Advantages

The service is:

• GDPR compliant (with no banner to add)
• Free for basic features
• Based on image recognition (like reCaptcha)
• Easy to integrate
• Available in several languages

Disadvantages

The only drawbacks, which will surely be fixed in the future, are:

• A few strange images in the captchas
• A few translation issues in French

To install hCaptcha on your site, I invite you to visit their official website, which also contains all the technical documentation (easy to understand):

https://www.hcaptcha.com/

Fun Fact

If you still have doubts about the reliability of the service, I discovered while browsing their site that their board of directors includes none other than Brendan Eich!

Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript and the Brave browser

If you want to learn a bit more about him, we talk about it in our article 7 things you didn't know about JavaScript