Not just tracking cookies, but browser fingerprinting.
Not just Google, but now Cloudflare.
It’s a free service that’s been provided to website makers to easily add a way to reduce bot spam. And for a very long time, it worked
Captcha got tonnes of free training data, and in return website maintainer got an incredibly handy free tool to help secure their site.
Captcha 100% could have charged licensing for their tool, could charged money for developers to use their service.
They didn’t, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable they got the training data as “payment” instead.
Your favorite free websites you use get to have another part of their architecture stay free.
The website maintainer get an awesome free tool.
Captcha got training data to profit off of.
That’s good internet where everyone wins without the need for bullshit licensing and fees and royalties and subscriptions.
Would you have rather your Netflix account cost an extra 15 cents per month or whatever to offset yet another licensing cost for some captcha tool?
Captcha was never good at stopping bots. It was always used to identify who is a human. In other words exactly the opposite of what you think.
Edit: because I see confusion, maybe a language barrier, here is an example of what people think it is and how it works: https://youtube.com/shorts/rme6PT7-CRI Which is wrong on many levels.
Here is a better explanation of what I meant: https://youtu.be/VTsBP21-XpI
Hope this explains it better than my original comment.
That doesn’t make sense. There are only bots and humans. Identifying humans is stopping bots, and vice versa.
I can personally confirm it very much did help curb botting issues on my website.
CAPTCHAs make web sites awful to use, and waste the limited lifespans of billions of people.
There are other ways to manage bots.
Not easily, and not at the time, no, it really was a very easy way to quickly reduce bot problems at the time.
You’d get random spam for stuff that could flood your forums or etc, and setting up captcha had an extremely immediate and palpable effect on reducing the spam that came in from random bot farms and shit.
I can personally confirm that when I implemented captcha on my forums i maintained 14 years ago, it pretty substantially reduced spammers by a huge degree.
There’s no point in arguing what once was. Things have changed. CAPTCHAs are now less effective, far more invasive, and for many people, far more troublesome.
Cling to them if you like. I no longer use them on any of my sites, because I care about my users.
I love how it has taken this long for media to cover this issue. I thought this was common knowledge for about a decade
I stopped having any faith in google when Gmail came out and I noticed ads related to the content of my email. It would be naive to think that data usage was limited to showing targeted ads.
Insane! Thanks for sharing.
Really? 100 hours on average for each person on the globe, including babies, the elderly, and those in extreme poverty? That seems like a lot
Ridiculous, this number is clearly fake. Not saying that the highlighted subject is not an issue, it really is, but why lie about the number ? I’m sure the real number is impressive enough
I guess I do one or two a day on average, say 500 a year. At 5 seconds each, thats about 42 mins a year. I’m a fairly heavy user too. Recaptcha has been round for what, 15-20 years? So that’s like 15 hours total at a rough guess…
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/buster-captcha-solver-for/mpbjkejclgfgadiemmefgebjfooflfhl
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/
A useful extension. Works 90% of the time for me.
The details are horrific:
- 819 million hours spent solving CAPTCHAs.
- $6.1 billion worth of our time at the US federal minimum wage.
- 134 Petabytes of internet bandwidth.
- consuming 7.5 million kWhs of energy.
- which produced 7.5 million pounds of CO2 pollution.
- This one’s from the author of the article: putting the 819 million hours against the average human lifespan of 79 years, that’s 1,182.7 lifetimes spent solving CAPTCHAs.
I had to go through seven captcha screens a couple of days ago just to apply for a fucking job.
If I wasn’t so desperate for work, I would have said fuck it. I hate it.
I knew it was training LLMs. I had a just had a feeling that it was, not any specific evidence. I hate being right all the time. -_-
Feeling? Google literally states this is one of their goals:
Every time our CAPTCHAs are solved, that human effort helps digitize text, annotate images, and build machine learning datasets. This in turn helps preserve books, improve maps, and solve hard AI problems.
Not LLMs, self-driving cars. Ever noticed how most of the challenges are things you need to recognize while driving?
Yeah you’re probably right, but Google doesn’t have a self driving car right? I guess they are just selling it the data.
Google does in fact have a self-driving car. You may have heard of it: https://waymo.com/
But captcha is mainly about fingerprinting users versus using it to train self driving models. Google is primarily an advertising company, so being able to track users’ browsing patterns is more useful to their core business model.
If you read the paper this is based on, there’s little reason to think this. It’s just supposition by the authors in an unpublished arXiv paper.
Google already has tracking cookies for advertising all over the place. Capturing behavior on a captcha challenge is of little extra utility.
Yeah I saw that it was more about fingerprinting and tracking, but that it was also sold used and sold AI training.
Also thanks, I didn’t realize Waymo was a part of Google.
You know, I think the best way for the Internet as a whole to stop using people as product, is to have a worldwide publically subsidised Internet, like the BBC or PBS but it is the Internet. The governments pitches in just like with any global programmes.
The best way is for people to stop trying to make as much money as possible with as little effort as possible.
It’s not about keeping the lights on, putting kids through school, or putting bread on the table. It’s about living as luxurious a life as possible with as little effort as possible. That’s it.
If these people were forced to do more with less, they would because they have no other choice. They have other choices, so that’s what they take.
I’m sorry, but people like you are actually helping them by peddling the narrative that they need this money. They don’t. Plenty of people work harder than them for less because they have no choice.
We need to stop giving businesses decisions on how to f**k us and just band together with higher standards so they make less profit.
Everyone who gives them money should be seen as a class traitor, because that’s what they are.
People buy magnets and tape them to their body because they think it cures cancer.
Why would these people use free Internet when premium luxury deluxe Internet is available for only .99¢ a month.
And then why wouldn’t PLDI, Inc founder not use his influence to get elected president and kill that bad public Internet.
Exactly. We’re all out here licking corporate boots by clicking traffic lights for free, propping up their data plantations under the guise of “security.” Google turned paranoia into profit, and now Cloudflare’s farming our fingerprints like we’re glorified dairy cows.
That $3 settlement? Peanuts to keep us complacent while they mint billions off our collective unpaid labor. The real CAPTCHA is figuring out how to burn this extractive circus to the ground before we’re all indentured to their algorithmic overlords.
It starts with striking till Musk is out of government, otherwise:
How much is rent for one of those fuckers though?
Scientists agree that the human body, at rest, can produce around 100 watts of power on average. This is enough electricity to power up a light bulb. Some humans have the ability to output over 2,000 watts of power, for instance if sprinting.
https://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/nervous-system/human-body-make-electricity.htm
So what you’re saying is the matrix will keep us constantly paranoid and stressed to keep power output high?
Now there’s a creative argument for meditation.
If standing around doesn’t make him stop we have to be prepared to do the things we all know are required to stop fascists.
The shit has absolutely destroyed the internet. they only keep getting worse, taking more time and making me feel more stupid. there is no God.
I always click wrong stuff first to see which captcha is training on my input and which one is actually checking what I click.
how do you tell by doing that?
If you click on the wrong stuff and it lets you through then it’s training.
yeah, clicking on the checkmark means you are giving them permission to view info about your browser history, and what you did on those sites.
For every site that uses it and reports back to Google for their ad money.
