Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness

Cloudflare is launching an experiment to eliminate CAPTCHAs, which are used by online services to distinguish between humans and bots. The company estimates that the average time spent on a CAPTCHA challenge is 32 seconds, resulting in approximately 500 human years wasted daily. Instead of using traditional CAPTCHAs, Cloudflare aims to use hardware security keys like YubiKey for users to prove their humanity without revealing their identity. The experiment relies on Web Authentication (WebAuthn) Attestation, a standardized API that provides a secure interface for user authentication and cryptography capabilities of devices. This approach is expected to improve user experience and privacy while maintaining strong security measures for accessing internet properties protected by Cloudflare's global network.