Google's reCAPTCHAv2 is just labor exploitation, boffins say
www.theregister.com
Web puzzles don't protect against bots, but humans have spent 819 million unpaid hours solving them

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.”

    • @[email protected]English
      24•4 months ago

      Finally heard a clear audio CAPTCHA for the first time in my life this past month. It was glorious. There was slight garbling before and after the characters were read, but that’s it.

      Besides that singular experience, all audio CAPTCHAs have been utterly 100% impossible to interpret. Blaring white noise followed by a small squeak of “threeve” or “eleventeen”.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•4 months ago

        I’ve found them to be pretty clear usually. Half-formed words at start/end I just ignore. Either way, even on Firefox with uBlock and all the rest, audio captchas have always passed me first try even if I think I got it wrong. I don’t like posting about it in-case they tighten it up after it gets more users.