Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

Cloudflare has migrated its CAPTCHA provider from Google's reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha due to privacy concerns and the need for more flexibility in customizing CAPTCHAs. The company uses CAPTCHAs as a challenge to determine whether traffic is malicious or good, with human intervention required for some challenges. Since its early days, Cloudflare has used Google's reCAPTCHA service, which was free but raised privacy concerns among some customers and faced blocking issues in regions like China. Earlier this year, Google informed Cloudflare that it would begin charging for reCAPTCHA, prompting the company to search for a better alternative. After evaluating various vendors and building its own system, Cloudflare chose hCaptcha due to its privacy-focused approach, performance, accessibility features, support for Privacy Pass, and ability to work in regions where Google is blocked. The company worked with hCaptcha to reduce costs and ensure scalability.