this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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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 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
171 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

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