Cloudflare wants to end CAPTCHA - here is why

it takes a user on average 32 seconds to complete a CAPTCHA challenge

Cloudflare, the company that provides DNS services and better known as the name on the page telling you why a website would not load, says it is time to end CAPTCHA.

In a blog, the company says that humanity wastes 500 human years in a single day solving annoying CAPTCHA puzzles. You know the ones: click on bikes, select crossroads, click on boxes with traffic lights etc.

Based on its data, it takes a user on average 32 seconds to complete a CAPTCHA challenge.

"There are 4.6 billion global Internet users. We assume a typical Internet user sees approximately one CAPTCHA every 10 days," it says.

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) puzzles are a way for online businesses to tell whether a user is human or not. The problem is it is more likely to drive users away with how needlessly time-consuming and difficult it can sometimes be. Overtime, the challenge posed by the CAPTCHA has become easier to manipulate for bots than actual humans and that's saying something.

Cloudflare is proposing a more radical alternative, something it calls Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood. The way it works is that you visit a website, it asks you to verify that you are human then it reads a physical USB security key attached to your computer and then waves you through. The process is faster and more efficient.

Cloudflare also claims that this is better for privacy too since attestation is not uniquely linked to the user device.