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

Is that good?

Not just tracking cookies, but browser fingerprinting.

Not just Google, but now Cloudflare.

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23m 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/

8 0

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2d ago

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

76 1

Technology @beehaw.org

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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

236 43

89 comments

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.
  https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/?hl=es%2Findex.html
- Not LLMs, self-driving cars. Ever noticed how most of the challenges are things you need to recognize while driving?
  
  Yeah you’re probably right, but Google doesn’t have a self driving car right? I guess they are just selling it the data.
  
  Google does in fact have a self-driving car. You may have heard of it: https://waymo.com/
  But captcha is mainly about fingerprinting users versus using it to train self driving models. Google is primarily an advertising company, so being able to track users' browsing patterns is more useful to their core business model.
  
  Yeah I saw that it was more about fingerprinting and tracking, but that it was also sold used and sold AI training.
  Also thanks, I didn’t realize Waymo was a part of Google.
  
  If you read the paper this is based on, there's little reason to think this. It's just supposition by the authors in an unpublished arXiv paper.
  Google already has tracking cookies for advertising all over the place. Capturing behavior on a captcha challenge is of little extra utility.