this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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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."

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[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)
[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Judging from the reviews, it doesn't

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 months ago

Ah, right, there are reviews too.

[–] ohmyiv@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

I tried it before. It worked for me on one small game website for account creation. After that it was more or less useless on any other site. It has a weird focus thing where it'll try to solve the captcha before you can enter in login details so if by chance the extension works, you'll fail the login anyways.

It still needs work. I think if the dev can work out those issues it could be great. Until then, it's pretty much worthless.

[–] TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee 0 points 4 months ago

Sometimes I think writers just try to find things to be edgy about. The straws this grasps at it are incredible. Might as well complain from the billions of unpaid man hours people provide by providing common courtesy for free.

[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Remember the good old days when it was just malformed text you have to solve? I miss those days. AI was complete garbage and they had to use farms of eyeballs to solve them for bots, making it a costly operation. We've now totally gotten away from all of that.

[–] 0laura@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

that was also to train ai.

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[–] hiramfromthechi@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

There's nothing that can express my disdain for Google's reCaptcha.

😒 We're training its AI models 😒 It's free labor for Google 😒 Sometimes it wants the corner of an object, sometimes it doesn't 😒 Wildly inconsistent 😒 Always blurry and hard to see 😒 Seemingly endless 😒 It's the robot asking us humans if we're the robots

[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 0 points 4 months ago

Why is that no news to me? How did so many people not know that? Should I have spread the word more, even if all people I told that where likr “yea, yea, of course, but, what can I do? 🤷🏻‍♀️”?

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 0 points 4 months ago

No one makes a company use reCAPTCHA.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit

Well duh.

reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google's own AI models and services.

If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community's concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.

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[–] FierySpectre@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

I mean, duh? With proof of work captchas existing, there's no reason to have those image selection captchas... Ever...

How those work is by having the server generate a puzzle. Server side this is cheap to generate, while client side solving is "hard". The server can even choose the difficulty of the puzzle, and even set it dynamically. This means that when your website is under light load the captcha can be really easy/fast to solve. If your website is under attack however the captcha can be set to take seconds to solve.

[–] cley_faye@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

reCAPTCHA v2 visual challenge images are all pre-labeled and user input plays no role in image labeling

That's funny, because when I'm faced with this, I keep adding/removing one of the image randomly and it keeps accepting them as ok.

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[–] 4grams@awful.systems 0 points 4 months ago (8 children)

I honestly thought it was common knowledge that these things were essentially free labor for training AI.

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