Here's a scenario: a dissident living in a third world country with pervasive surveillance. He accesses the net using TOR, and disables cookies.
Now his IP is blacklisted, because there are lots of people using the same exit node; his reputation is low for the same reason, and the cookie is rejected. There's a good chance that this one person will be blocked, even though he didn't do anything wrong.
For a simpler case, private browser sessions over a VPN would suffer from the same issue.
I would argue that the problem of spam and hackers is a greater burden on society as a whole than someone in Iran not being able to get past a captcha.
I see where you are coming from, specially considering that spam makes up for a significant volume of the entire internet traffic. However, I'd think it wiser for one spammer to go free than for one person to be denied access to legitimate content.
I'm often being denied access to free content because I'm accessing from the "wrong" countries, and that's infuriating. If I start being locked out of free content due to my privacy measures, I'm probably going to start setting buildings on fire.
I'm not probably_wrong, so I can't speak for him/her.
But while I believe content creators should be able to control access, I think it's ridiculous to ban certain countries from access to certain content -- I don't quite see the point.
And also, being "owed" free content != being able to access free content you otherwise would be able to access were it not for a service like TOR or a VPN (e.g. escaping the Chinese firewall using a VPN service whose IP is banned from a website versus wanting to watch a movie but living in Germany instead of the U.S.)
Spearfishing and hacking accounts does indeed cost some people their life savings and cause elderly people with semi-comfortable retirements to go into poverty. I think hackers do indeed cause society harm. It`s not just some email in a folder you never check.
The problem that the GP was talking about wasn't being forced to solve a captcha, but of getting blacklisted before even being given a chance to solve it.
Now his IP is blacklisted, because there are lots of people using the same exit node; his reputation is low for the same reason, and the cookie is rejected. There's a good chance that this one person will be blocked, even though he didn't do anything wrong.
For a simpler case, private browser sessions over a VPN would suffer from the same issue.