CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google
CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google
Is that good?
Not just tracking cookies, but browser fingerprinting.
Not just Google, but now Cloudflare.
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.
Compare it to some stats for some truly useless Internet services if you really want to make a point
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
It's over a 13 year period:
The researchers took the average completion time of 3.53 seconds across both image and behavior CAPTCHAs and multiplied that against a low-end estimate of 512 billion v1 and v2 reCAPTCHAs completed across the internet between 2010 and 2023, resulting in the following estimations of their impact on our lives:
It ends up being like, .175 seconds per day for the average internet user after some rough estimates
.175s x 365 x 13 ~= 830s per person over 13 year. Which is little less than 14min per user. Scaling by 8 billion people (which is way above the average amount over the period) that's 1.8 billion hours, which is 450 times less than the announced number
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 still couldn't figure out from the article how google supposedly makes money off of captchas. I had to go about 2 levels down from the article to end up at a long, drawn out youtube video and then had to search some more to find out the "I'm not a robot" page tracks small mouse cursor movements to see if you are human.
And track you across the internet for ad revenue and… other things.
That is cookies I assume and probably data sharing between websites. I know if I look up something on amazon I immediately start seeing ads for related stuff on FB and on google.
Insane! Thanks for sharing.
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.
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 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.
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.
Reviews on the Firefox one says it requires you to download and install another app for it to work. Screw that nonsense.
The success rate of the extension can be improved by simulating user interactions with the help of a client app.
It's optional
I wish they had mobile versions. :/
Holy shit I'm trying this
Thanks. Gonna try this out.
Awesome! Thanks.
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.
It's the first qualification you need to have
I guess so, but I was starting to think maybe I was a robot after about the fourth.
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.
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.
I already pay for internet access. I think most people do. Use that money.
Are you saying to use that money to pay every single company not to use my data without my permission?
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.
No idea what you're talking about, but most people are not trying to get endorsements.
just band together
Good luck!
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.
Why would these people use free Internet when premium luxury deluxe Internet is available for only .99¢ a month.
Same reason as why public broadcasting still exist and is quite popular.
It is about having choice to be a product of the Internet titans or not.
Click the squares with your freedom in them:
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?
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?
Err... couldn't the corporation just make less profit but still provide the service as-is?
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?si=iGx_v7Qp7oYqJQ3S Which is wrong on many levels.
Here is a better explanation of what I meant: https://youtu.be/VTsBP21-XpI?si=viw0FEMffyhyba9v
Hope this explains it better than my original comment.
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.
I got my compensation money from a different lawsuit, it was totally worth the ~$3usd
Hey at least you bought the lawyers in charge another summer home.
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.
