Website Captcha for Garmin Connect

Yes I recently got Garmin and I've experienced th. I didn't experience with Apple, is extremely annoying and it's very offputting and forcing me to reconsider using the product, what time is extremely valuable to me and I'm not gonna have it wasted by a pathetic product that won't allow me to login. I don't understand the point of it. I'm already logged in on Garmin connect and it opens up the window to Garmin connect from the Garmin connect app so why am I having to login again? That's just poor code. I would also just like to add that the website when using on a mobile browser is extremely badly formatted and goes to show that this company doesn't have a clue what it's doing with code. All in on extremely poor experience with very bad code

Its preposterous that Garmin thinks this is necessary login security while my bank, credit cards, and HIPAA-protected data portals have no such thing.  Nor do I want them to add it.  I agree vehemently that the complexity of the challenges is ludicrous - sometimes it takes as much a minute to clear all the hurdles, and I seriously doubt my mouse skills mimic robotic movements.  If they were trying to discourage users from ever logging into the web servers, I'm likely to be one of the users who stop entirely.

My spidey sense says this has something to do with ensuring the browser has access to gooogle for who-knows-what (CAPTCHA is a gooogle thing); you can only login to Garmin if you have connectivity to gooogle.  The longer challenges might be to give goooogle sufficient time to steal whatever they're stealing.  I used to be able to login to Garmin with goooogle blocked, but that doesn't work anymore.

For what it's worth I've never had to solve a CAPTCHA to log into the Connect website (I use it almost every day).

I agree that if I had to solve CAPTCHAs for 1 minute just to log in to Connect, I would stop using it. Sounds super frustrating.

7494571 said:

My spidey sense says this has something to do with ensuring the browser has access to gooogle for who-knows-what (CAPTCHA is a gooogle thing); you can only login to Garmin if you have connectivity to gooogle.  The longer challenges might be to give goooogle sufficient time to steal whatever they're stealing.  I used to be able to login to Garmin with goooogle blocked, but that doesn't work anymore.

I mean...google (and other companies) already have the ability the harvest all kinds of data from you, do you really think they need to keep you occupied solving CAPTCHAs for a minute to do so? If anything, that might have the opposite effect of causing you to stop using Connect altogether (like you said), which would be counterproductive (assuming they somehow need you to log in to Connect to steal your data).

Wouldn't it make a lot more sense for goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle to quietly steal your data in the background while you're using Connect (surely for much longer than 1 minute)?

I think the real explanation for the increasingly complex and time-consuming CAPTCHAs is that LLMs can already solve the simplest CAPTCHAs. (The other thing is that CAPTCHAs are also used to train LLMs and self-driving algorithms, which is why you're often asked to identify things like bicycles and crosswalks.)

And the reason for the CAPTCHAs in the first place is that Garmin doesn't want bots crawling Connect (wasting their bandwidth, possibly harvesting their data in ways that they don't like, possibly trying to break into their systems.)

Its helpful to know that not everyone sees the reCaptcha challenges. I'm leaning toward thinking GC JS doesn't like de-gooogled Chromium and other less-usual browsers.

7494571 said:

I'm leaning toward thinking GC JS doesn't like de-gooogled Chromium and other less-usual browsers.

It is not GC JS who asks for the captcha, it is CloudFlare - it is a 3rd party service serving as a security gateway. It may block users coming from IP addresses with bad reputation (frequently abused by hackers, or by spammers, or compromised by viruses), or those hiding their identity. So using anonymizers, or VPNs can be one of the reasons why CloudFlare asks you to prove you are not a bot. Those measures were added after a very serious hacker incident at Garmin a few years ago.

trux said:

Those measures were added after a very serious hacker incident on Garmin a few years ago.

Yeah I wanted to bring that up.

All of this stuff makes a huge amount of sense given the ransomware attack on Garmin a few years back. Yes, it inconveniences (a minority of) regular users, but it's clearly not done for no reason and/or just to annoy people.