Google's reCAPTCHAv2 has stolen 6.1 billion dollars in labor, wasted 7.5 million kWhs of energy, and aggressively tracks you (PDF).
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~148 words, about a 1 min read.
This is a great study. I really appreciate the analysis of reCAPTCHA not only on its pollution and privacy-invasiveness but also on the understanding that it is stealing labor.
"We explore the cost and security of reCAPTCHAv2 and conclude that it has an immense cost and no security. Overall, we believe that this study’s results prompt a natural conclusion: reCAPTCHAv2 and similar reCAPTCHA technology should be deprecated."
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Our cost analysis investigates total human time spent solving reCAPTCHAv2, human labor, network traffic, electricity usage, potential profits and the corresponding environmental impact. There have been at least 512 billion reCAPTCHAv2 sessions, taking 819 million hours, which translates into at least $6.1 billion USD in free wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHAv2 consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO2 pollution
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— Via Andrew Searles, Renascence Tarafder Prapty, Gene Tsudik, Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2