That might sound like a clickbait title, but it really isn't. You have with 99.9999% certainty helped Google in building self driving cars without ...
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Perfect! 🤣
I was a big supporter of google's captcha when they were digitizing written works, but now they aren't helping humanity and are super annoying, so I agree they should be avoided.
To your shower thought, no, google using your captcha answers to train their algorithm isn't illegal. Fundamentally, it's no different than a site keeping track of which articles get the most clicks and using that information to order a feed of popular articles. Honestly, I'm at a loss for any reason such a use wouldn't be legal.
Like I said, it was just a silly shower thought as I hadn't given permission to use my "data". I should perhaps have made that more clear that it was just a silly thought!
No worries, you were clear enough. My bad if my response came off as overly serious. I probably could have worded the last sentence better as an inquiry for your reasoning. I'll blame it on a leafblower outside making it hard to think clearly. :P
You referring to it as your data does give me an idea where you're coming from.
The difference is between
account A clicked item Banditem B was clicked. What your account has clicked would be your data, but what things have been clicked would be the company's data.If they were using specific or personal information from your account together with the clicks to train their bot, then that would probably fall afoul of things like the GDPR or at least need to be covered in their ToS, but if they are using generic information (ie thing was clicked) then they aren't doing anything illegal and arguably aren't even being unethical as far as information usage goes.
Hope that helps answer your shower thought, now it's time for me to stop procrastinating on this site and try to actual accomplish some work for the day. :)
I suppose it's OK for me to plug my own alternative captcha here that does not rely on tracking users or them labeling data, hCaptcha is owned by a data labeling company too :(.
It's a bit different as it's based on proof of work - so instead of paying in human labor your device does some computation. If we think you're a bot this task gets more difficult. This means that we don't have to collect user data and as there is no task for the user, it's as accessible as a captcha will get :).
friendlycaptcha.com
Interesting, without digging through the site how does the proof of work prove it isn't a bot?
Could I not use puppeteer to navigate the page, how does it prevent that? Or does it not work in a headless browser?
I think the most straightforward answer is that it doesn't prove that it isn't a bot. Instead it adds a small cost to whatever the action is on your website you want to protect (e.g. submitting a form). Some of our customers set the difficulty to be quite high if their goal is to "slow down" scrapers to make them uneconomical, as it runs in the background anyway real users don't really notice as they are busy filling the form.
As you mentioned in your article if you have even a modest budget you can pass any captcha ($5 per 1000 human reCAPTCHA solves is actually on the higher end.. with a bit of searching you will find <$1 per 1000). Our captcha doesn't lock out anyone with disabilities or other accessibility concerns, doesn't kill conversion with forced tasks, and doesn't sell out your customer's privacy. Other than the competitors we are on the same side as you: your visitors' data is a burden for us, not an asset. It's in our interest to collect as little as possible of it.
There are some anti-headless checks clientside, but those are pretty basic so I don't think they would pose a huge obstacle. So if you script yourself around those and are willing to pay xx to xxx seconds of computation per request eventually, you can get through,
Sorry for the long answer, I just hope it highlights the difference in tradeoffs.
No that is a great answer.
Seriously, I never had an idea about how google gets benefited from it. Implementing reCAPTCHA is free, and that naturally made me wonder what was Google's business model.
Thanks to you, I've cleared my long time doubt.
It is one of those things that the second you hear it you go “ah, of course”! I didn’t put the self driving cars part together until recently, I thought they were just training Google images again 😜
Google is going big brain
And that's why Hcaptcha is there for us :D