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The developer in me hates what #CloudFlare's anti-bot checks are turning the web into. As a blind person, I'm occasionally frustrated at having to obtain an accessibility cookie to bypass the CAPTCHA. My inclusive design/accessibility professional side hates that those cookies have to be obtained in a way that doesn't fully respect privacy.
But simply as a human, what I find most objectional of all is CloudFlare's "Checking if the site connection is secure" messaging. That sounds like a good thing; how nice that this site is looking out for my protection as a humble web user! When in fact, my activity and circumstances are being checked against an arbitrary set of requirements and baseline-level metrics, to determine if I have the right to go where I want to go. It has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with information lockdown.
Of course, CloudFlare's lawyers probably signed off on this copy as being just close enough to the truth. They are checking that the site connection is secure... against bad actors. Which they may very well find to be you if they can't prove your human nature beyond reasonable doubt, so watch out.
James, my pet peeve is web sites with capchas where I don’t understand the business need for ensuring that it is not a bot. My best guess is that capchas allow web sites to sell advertising based on the count of real human visitors.
You mention Cloudflare, but there are plenty of tech giants that offer seductively useful “free” services. I use services from Cloudflare and Google that save me a ton of time (and some money) when in principle I would feel better self-hosting.
@mark_watson @jscholes The ones that annoy me are the Kobo and Sony sites. In both cases I have logged in with a username and password to an account that has spent money with them for years, but for some reason they seem to want me to go through a CAPTCHA check. Sony is the most annoying because I have TOTP two factor security involved; no bot is going to get past that.