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Forget security – Google's reCAPTCHA v2 is exploiting users for profit | Web puzzles don't protect against bots, but humans have spent 819 million unpaid hours solving them (www.theregister.com)

submitted 3 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I thought the whole point of reCaptcha was to provide a reliable set of data to train bots. Entering a fuzzy scanned word, identifying bikes and traffic lights, etc.

The fact that they've now got that, and the bots are trained is hardly a surprise.

Without captchas the problem of spambots would still be a million times worse.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yup. I like Cloudflare's checkbox, it works well and probably catches more bots than reCaptcha while being simple for humans.

[–] gwilikers@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How does that checkbox work? Does it just look at your cookies?

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No, it tracks things like mouse movements to see if it looks human or like a bot. Humans don't move the mouse in a straight line, there's some jitter and whatnot, whereas bots will look quite a bit different.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's super easy to fake for a bot..

It's a ton more than mouse movement. Lots of browser fingerprinting for example and tracking.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

Yup. It does do a lot more than the checkbox, but the checkbox itself mostly does mouse movement and click tests.