Writing in its bog, the company wrote that competing with Google and other Big Tech companies seemed like a tall order with their fancy city ways, monopolistic market power, platform effects and army of highly paid developers.

“Our story shows that it doesn't have to be that way -- you can beat Big Tech by focusing on privacy”, the blog reads.

Google reCAPTCHA, consumes enormous amounts of behavioral data to determine whether web users are legitimate humans or bots.

However hCaptcha uses privacy-preserving machine learning techniques to identify typical bot behaviours at high accuracy, all while consuming and storing as little data as possible.

“Google is an ad company, and their security products look very much like their ad products: they track user behavior on every page of a website and across the web. We designed hCaptcha to be as privacy-friendly as possible from day one.

"This led to a completely different approach to the problem. As it turns out, tracking users across the web and tying their web history to their identity is completely unnecessary for achieving good security. The many companies that have switched over to hCaptcha often report equal or better performance in bot detection and mitigation despite our privacy focus.”