TECH NEWS – A 2023 study (conducted at UC Irvine and called Dazed and Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCaptchav2) has revealed a shocking result!
The study concluded that captchas fail to prevent bot-generated traffic, raise security concerns with tracking cookies, and waste billions of hours of our time while generating nearly $1 trillion worth of data for Google, which acquired ReCaptcha in 2009. There are two forms of this, by the way: one that asks you to poke in the square to indicate that you are human, and one that is image-based, using images from Google Street View to ask you to check any square that has, say, a traffic light, a motorcycle, or a set of stairs.
These are worth a lot of money to Google, because the former’s tracking cookies can help target ads, and the latter can be used to train artificial intelligence models, either in-house or sold to another company. During the experiment, subjects were unaware that Google ReCaptchav2 had been added to the account creation and password reset functions of the university’s internal student account system, and researchers tracked both the time it took to complete the captchas and a subset of 3,600 users over the 13-month study to report on their experiences.
The study turned negative when attention shifted to more complex image recognition captchas. The study also observed differences in completion time based on educational background, experience level, and account creation or recovery. The researchers measured an average completion time of 3.53 seconds for both capable and behavioral Captchas, and multiplied this by a lower bound estimate of 512 billion v1 and v2 reCaptchas performed on the web between 2010 and 2023 to get an estimate of the impact they could have on our lives: 819 million hours spent solving Captchas (that’s 1182.7 lifetimes if we estimate an average life expectancy of 79 years!), we wasted $6.1 billion worth of time at the US federal minimum wage, the Internet bandwidth was 134 petabytes, in energy consumption that’s 7.5 million kWh of energy consumption, and that resulted in 3.4 million kilograms of CO2 pollution.
In this study, by comparing the time and accuracy rates of bots, as well as looking at previous studies on the increasing ability of automated processes to solve Captcha’s, the researchers concluded that bots are now faster than humans at filling in reCaptchav2 squares, while taking more time, but are more accurate at image recognition. The researchers say that tracking cookies actually pose a new security and privacy risk. It is estimated that Google received $8.75-32.3 billion for the entire reCaptchav2 dataset, which could theoretically be sold multiple times to different vendors, and that all reCaptchav2 tracking cookies produced between 2010 and 2023 have a lifetime value of $888 billion.
According to the study, reCaptcha technology should be deprecated because it does not contribute to the security and functionality of the Internet. But two years have passed and we still encounter them…
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