Why do I need to complete a CAPTCHA when signing up?

If you encountered a CAPTCHA during sign-up, it’s not because we doubt you – it’s because we want to keep bad actors out. CAPTCHAs are those little puzzles (like “select all images with traffic lights” or distorted text to type in) that websites use to differentiate real humans from automated bots.

Private.Ki uses CAPTCHA verification in the registration process to prevent automated systems from creating large numbers of fake accounts. This is a crucial part of our anti-spam and anti-abuse measures.

Without CAPTCHAs, malicious bots could try to sign up for thousands of accounts and then use them to send spam or perform attacks. That would not only harm recipients of those messages but also hurt Private.Ki’s service (for example, our mail servers could get blacklisted if spammers abuse them).

By inserting a simple CAPTCHA step, we ensure that it’s a real person creating each account, which dramatically reduces automated abuse.

You might wonder, does this compromise privacy or anonymity? Rest assured, the CAPTCHA we use is hosted on our own servers and does not leak data to any external service or track you. It’s solely a one-time check.

We also encourage privacy tools at sign-up, so you could be behind a VPN or Tor; the CAPTCHA might be slightly more frequent or challenging in those cases (since some CAPTCHAs trigger more often on anonymous networks), but it’s still passable and worth the added privacy.