3d ago

CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

www.pcgamer.com A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' that made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

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A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' that made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

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3h ago

A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' that wasted 819 million hours of people's time to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

www.pcgamer.com /gaming-industry/a-2023-study-concluded-captchas-are-a-tracking-cookie-farm-for-profit-masquerading-as-a-security-service-that-made-us-spend-819-billion-hours-clicking-on-traffic-lights-to-generate-nearly-usd1-trillion-for-google/

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2d ago

2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

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3d ago

CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

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43 comments

It's a lot easier to determine the intent of this hed with the quote being closed somewhere. Just after "service" would have been my guess, but it's a disservice to remove that and leave people dangling.
My larger issue is that when I'm faced with traffic lights -- or, god forbid, motorcycles -- this is performative nonsense wherein I'm supposed to guess percentage coverage on a given square without having been provided parameters.
At this point, CAPTCHAs feel designed to make sure you can never get through the first time, thus needing to continue training image models several times before I can just fucking do what I originally came to the site for.
- I already hate them for access gating based on unnecessary labour, and deliberately making access more cumbersome for people not using chrome and using VPNs
  But what really peeves me off, even though it's much less important, is that they don't localise them.
  Where are the crosswalks? What the hell is a crosswalk. How many trolleys in this picture? None, that's a picture of a tram!
  
  "I see no trucks, only lorries." Being on a VPN has been getting worse and worse with CAPTCHAs, almost like I'm being punished for telling my ISP they have no right to sell the details of my internet use since I'm paying them.
- At this point, CAPTCHAs feel designed [...] training image models
  It was never a secret:
  The reCAPTCHA program originated with Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn, and was aided by a MacArthur Fellowship. An early CAPTCHA developer, he realized "he had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles"
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA#Origin
  
  I was fine with it when it was wavy text to digitise old works. This shit is just asinine and a time sink.
  
  Yeah... only OCR and AI have advanced to the point where a spammer/bot can easily bypass them.
  20+ years ago, Microsoft proposed a Penny Black project, which was superseded by reCAPTCHA. Nowadays, we might have to go back to that... maybe by mining crypto as a proof of effort.
  
  Proof of work. See mCaptcha and Friendly Captcha.

43 comments