Research Findings:
- reCAPTCHA v2 is not effective in preventing bots and fraud, despite its intended purpose
- reCAPTCHA v2 can be defeated by bots 70-100% of the time
- reCAPTCHA v3, the latest version, is also vulnerable to attacks and has been beaten 97% of the time
- reCAPTCHA interactions impose a significant cost on users, with an estimated 819 million hours of human time spent on reCAPTCHA over 13 years, which corresponds to at least $6.1 billion USD in wages
- Google has potentially profited $888 billion from cookies [created by reCAPTCHA sessions] and $8.75–32.3 billion per each sale of their total labeled data set
- Google should bear the cost of detecting bots, rather than shifting it to users
“The conclusion can be extended that the true purpose of reCAPTCHA v2 is a free image-labeling labor and tracking cookie farm for advertising and data profit masquerading as a security service,” the paper declares.
In a statement provided to The Register after this story was filed, a Google spokesperson said: “reCAPTCHA user data is not used for any other purpose than to improve the reCAPTCHA service, which the terms of service make clear. Further, a majority of our user base have moved to reCAPTCHA v3, which improves fraud detection with invisible scoring. Even if a site were still on the previous generation of the product, reCAPTCHA v2 visual challenge images are all pre-labeled and user input plays no role in image labeling.”
someguy3@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I kinda figured. It was annoying to do one, but then they wanted you to do two or three and thatcs absurd. Whenever it comes up now, I usually just close out.
Bezier@suppo.fi 3 months ago
Yea how about 20
LucidNightmare@lemm.ee 3 months ago
VPN? Google will just go in a loop with these things, so I just stopped using Google completely.
radivojevic@discuss.online 3 months ago
That’s because you’re shady.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
if you have to do that many, you either have some privacy setting on or on a flagged ip given from a VPN
sramder@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I tried to order some components on Digikey a few months ago and I’m still mentally scarred. Probably did a few hundred of those things over the course of 2 weeks.
ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Cries in battlenet sign up process
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 3 months ago
STOP BEING SNEAKY MICHAEL
Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
Some captchas have also just gotten obvious AI training. “Click on the living being in this image”, “Select every image of the same object as in this example image”. And the images you have to select look obviously AI generated.
cm0002@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Heh, I got one just the other day “Select the images containing structures built by people” lmao
aaaaace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
Those one answers incorrectly.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
Im surprised that this is in the news right now. This has been acknowledged as fact for a decade or so.
GhostTheToast@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Relevant 1053
dinckelman@lemmy.world 3 months ago
At a certain point I did like 10 of them, and then ended up closing the page, cause it never let me in, all because I was on a vpn
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Funny thing is they stop asking if you do them really slowly. Almost as if to tell you, you‘re too inefficient to even be an unpaid intern or something. Anyway, if they annoy you, take your time.