“…Google's widely-used CAPTCHA system is primarily a mechanism for tracking user behavior and collecting data while providing little actual security against bots.”
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Ugh. I hate this one with a passion. Especially when I have to select all the images with bikes, crosswalks, traffic lights, etc and they still don’t let me through. This explains so much.
It's the most breakable system in the world! Like AI people were bragging about models able to break them, but you could do it with far less advanced tools
A few years ago I dug through early framings of reCAPTCHA and how excited they were to get people to work for free. But in what's a surprise to nobody, they soon became much more secretive about that goal.
Very great to see this confirmed with a large-scale user study!
More up-to-date sites use reCAPTCHA3, which evaluates whether a user is a bot without user input. There are other methods to block bots, but not in all cases.
Form spam (several submissions per second) would quickly convince you of the need for tools to tell the difference b/n bot vs human.
id like to introduce my proposal to be PAID for my data as well as my time. if I'm being analyzed and profited on against my consent I'd like a twelve dollar check in the mail every month thank you very much
Could some clever people work out how to at least tax google for these "capital gains" and get the money back at least indirectly. Naive and probably unfeasible friday thought. I should concentrate on England's slim chances of beating France tomorrow.
How in the hell is that data worth 800 billion? How is that possible? How much of our economy is just big bubbles? And if they aren't, seriously how are they worth so much?!
Capital is in full Financialization phase powered by credit and borrowing from the future. So its not really worth that, they just speculate about it and keep peddling BIG DATA bs, that the metrics magically allow them to perfectly predict behavior and targets for marketing to enhance sales.
Nowadays marketing is the biggest money maker and they can leverage those data for better targeting for which advertisers are willing to paid for. This is also why genAI is desired so much by marketers, they could use those data and generate personalized ads.
Such data kinda has to be collected to enact anti-bot tech like reCAPTCHA 🤷♂️
It's for sure useless and just annoys humans tbh. Computers can solve them. Before they could do so reliably, I'd just pay humans pennies to solve them for me.
The value of cookies that Google collects isn’t worth more than their annual revenue! Even people whose job it is to overvalue this stuff in the hopes that credulous advertisers will pay for it wouldn’t dream of pumping their numbers like that.
The value of time wasted by an interstitial isn’t the wages of the person waiting! That’s insane. You might as well say that we lose money equal to the GDP of Monaco every year because people can’t find a pen.
I spend five figures on the internet every year, and if I put all of my time and effort into it I couldn’t find buyers willing to pay $100 for my browser cookies, which according to this study are more valuable than gold.
I wonder what “extensively monitors” means in this context, too. I bet it means “it tells Google which domains that use reCAPTCHA create cookies,” which is the same as “which minuscule subset of domains don’t.”
I’ve surely spent at LEASE a million hours simply trying to determine whether or not that tiny shred of a bike handle in the leftmost square counts as a “motorcycle”
Privacy Badger, Ublock Origin, Duck Duck Go, etc. Do those extensions help? Is Mozilla or any second-tier browser company influence-able about promoting actual privacy more vigorously? Or is surveillance the only monetizable aspect of providing a browser experience at this point?
I attended an “innovation conference” where Luis Von-Ahn spoke about this project. It was training ai to recognize bikes, trains, & cross walks! It was deciphering old documents with illegible hand writing! It was populating the Gutenberg project with lesser known books with illegible passages! 👿
I mean, people use CAPTCHAs because if they don't they quickly find out why others do. This article is very loaded in accusations and light in actual proofs. The whole concept of ReCAPTCHA is analyzing user behavior to sort out bots, nothing crazy there 👀
Comments
[peeks through the eyeslot of my robot costume expectantly]
A few years ago I dug through early framings of reCAPTCHA and how excited they were to get people to work for free. But in what's a surprise to nobody, they soon became much more secretive about that goal.
Very great to see this confirmed with a large-scale user study!
(they won't, Google is Evil)
Form spam (several submissions per second) would quickly convince you of the need for tools to tell the difference b/n bot vs human.
(Though I switched a year ago because I prefer non-AI search results, I feel like an early adopter of something everyone should be doing.).
It's for sure useless and just annoys humans tbh. Computers can solve them. Before they could do so reliably, I'd just pay humans pennies to solve them for me.
Extensively monitors!
/s