Thanks, that’s interesting to read about. While I’m not a web developer, there would seem to be two very large differences between them.

1. The Apple tokens were designed for a single purpose, reducing (or eliminating) CAPCHAs, with mobile devices especially in mind. It also is not a replacement, but rather an enhancement of an existing web standard.

2. It’s Apple, a company that makes their money by selling you things you actually want. Rather than Google, a company that gives you (or other companies) things (for free or discounted) so they can make money off of you.

It is especially obvious when Google has the literal first bullet-point in their “why we are developing this” as…

This trust is the backbone of the open internet, critical for the safety of user data and for the sustainability of the website’s business.

Followed by

These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots.

So yeah, Google can kindly go pound sand as far as I’m concerned.

Any chance you have a link or source for this? I usually keep up on tech news but don’t remember anything of this nature.

Not a backend dev, but it would seem like this could possibly be partially solved by purging data past a certain age that falls into specific scenarios:

• Data from unfederated instances
• Data from users/posts/comments that have been deleted/removed

Also, deleting/removing content doesn’t really seem to do much currently as you still get all the info back from the server and it’s up to the frontend to not display it. I’m normally of the opinion of it you want to delete your comment it should be properly deleted (moderation removal being a separate issue).