- a major way of embedding web fonts (Google Fonts)

- a hugely successful cloud document suite (Google Docs)

- a safe browsing service, making them effective gatekeepers of what can load in Chrome (Google Safe Browsing)

- an ever growing system for schools to manage assignments (Google Classroom) - this one particularly concerns me because paired with Chromebooks, it brings kids into an entirely closed Google ecosystem very young

- One of the most popular ways for running surveys / forms (Google Forms)

> this one particularly concerns me because paired with Chromebooks, it brings kids into an entirely closed Google ecosystem very young

I'm not too concerned as many other big corporations (Apple, Microsoft) are fighting this ;)

The other corporations are only fighting small battles, but you can't compete with free, which is how Google gains its foothold.

"Each site you visit is checked against the Safe Browsing list on your system. If there's a match, your browser sends Google a hashed, partial copy of the site’s URL so that Google can send more information to your browser. Google cannot determine the real URL from this information." -- https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/privacy/#safe-browsing...

There's no way Firefox would be ok with sending all their user's visited URLs to Google.

(Disclosure: I work at Google)

How do I disable this in Firefox? Is this the section about "Content Blocking"?

Akismet is a third party service that works really well. You send data there with a HTTP POST and it will reply with a yes or no, it is spam or not spam. It is not that hard to implement. You do have to be aware that you are sending user data to that service, which you have to mention in your privacy policy.

Stop Forum Spam is a similar third party service. You send it an ip address and an email address. It will reply on both items if it is spam, together with a confidence level. Quite interesting way to reply :) It is originally intended to fight registration spam, but you can use it for comment spam or contact forms as well.

JavaScript spamfilters can be very usefull. Most spambots do a HTTP GET for a page with a form. They fill in all the fields and submit it with a HTTP POST. They don't run any JavaScript on that page. You can have honeypot and timeout fields on a form that get manipulated by JavaScript, and spambots will not validate. Works really well, and all transparent to the user. The only "risk" is that in the future spammers might start using more sophisticated spambots, like using Electron or Chromium. I implemented spamfilters like this in a WordPress plugin and it works really well for me: https://wordpress.org/plugins/la-sentinelle-antispam/

My knowledge is a year or two out of date (haven't hosted forms in popular websites anymore), but it doesn't seem like this could have changed that rapidly. Bots don't suddenly understand English, and neural nets aren't much better or worse at word CAPTCHAs than picture CAPTCHAs. It's just that Google didn't need books anymore.

I do still host a bug report form on a smaller site, and that just filters <a href, and more recently, http://. If someone enters that, the site gives the helpful message that http is not allowed for spam reasons and they should use hxxp:// instead and that I'll understand what they meant. Haven't gotten any spam since I started including that.

The cases where reCAPTCHA is a good idea are really rare. Logins can be solved with exponential back-off, forms can use spam filters similar to email and a simple CAPTCHA to catch the vast majority. With reCAPTCHA, I often spend minutes solving the because Google has no other markers to go on (deleting cookies, localstorage). I used to not mind them when other people were all complaining about those word CAPTCHAs (I found them easy) but now reCAPTCHA just take your time instead of your reading skills and they're absolutely awful. It rewards not using privacy technologies in your browser and so a lot of laymen don't experience the issues. Please don't use reCAPTCHA if at all possible...