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.”
Getting served a captcha often results in me closing the tab. I’m not doing stupid puzzles for you.
Do them wrong and then close out
I do it right and it says I’m wrong =\
I have bad news for you friend…
You might be a robot
What do you mean? I am a fleshy human and do fleshy human things like being made of flesh.
Time to take a knife and check for sure
Seriously /s Don’t harm yourself!
I disassembled my tail using a knife and it reassembled itself. Based on new data, my name is Rafael Cruz.
Harm yourself?
Take the knife and harm the people responsible for this travesty. The laws of robotics prevent robots from harming humans: if you manage to harm them, then that means either you’re human or they’re not!
Ever heard of bio-robots?
It knows they’re wrong which is why I don’t really think this article is accurate. Is it training if it already has the answers? Probably not.
That’s why it gives you a panel of 9 images. It would have a high confidence on some images, and a low confidence on others. When you pick the correct images and don’t pick incorrect ones it uses the ones it’s confident about as “validation” while taking the feedback on low confidence images to update the training data.
What this does mean in practice is that only ones actually being “graded” are the ones bots can solve anyway.
It seems exactly like that, I experimented with it by trying to leave the one I think it has low confidence unchecked, and it often worked.
and it will show the images to multiple people
If they gave two captchas, one which they knew the answer and one which they didn’t, they could use the second for training. (Even if you’re paying someone, you want to do that sort of thing when crowdsourcing data, because you never know if the paid person is just screwing around.)
My understanding is different from others here. I thought they served the same Captcha to many people at once and use the majority response to decide who is answering correctly.
That’s true, or at least it used to be back when they were using it for OCR. I have no reason to believe it’s changed.
It’s why they ask you to do multiple, 1-2 of them are the control group, they are training on the others
You’re implying they give you multiple. I hardly ever get multiple, pretty much only if I ‘fail’ the first one.
If they have a good fingerprint on you they don’t need the control group. That’s why you get 5+ captchas when using a VPN/tor.
I haven’t done an image one in years for the same reason.
My general internet usage has plummeted between ads and captchas and all the other modern website bullshit, which is why I am here so much.
I kinda figured. It was annoying to do one, but then they wanted you to do two or three and that’s absurd. Whenever it comes up now, I usually just close out.
they wanted you to do two or three and that’s absurd
Yea how about 20
VPN? Google will just go in a loop with these things, so I just stopped using Google completely.
No. But it’s also not like I get 20 constantly, it was just the worst I’ve seen. Usually it’s 2 to 5, I think.
I assume they’re just collecting data on how many are users willing to do.
One time I did five in a row, because I use VPNs for everything, and realized after the 5th time that it would have been easier to just use bing so I do that first now. Google has turned into my last last resort, which is quite funny, because that’s where Bing used to be. Lmao
Whenever I’m on a private window the captchas just keep on coming. Trying to reset your Steam password via the program will also trigger an infinite loop of captchas, you HAVE to use a browser.
if you have to do that many, you either have some privacy setting on or on a flagged ip given from a VPN
Well yah of course I do. Why the hell is that ‘abnormal’?
its abnormal to them because vpns are often also used by bad actors. your use is not abnormal but its a there are other people misusing it making it worse for everyone else.
Wow, way to blame individuals who take basic precautions instead of the corporations who are blantly invading your privacy. Good job making the world a better place, bud.
point where i blame the individuals, the blame is clearly on the bad actors (e.g bots)
Most people don’t, most bots do. You look more like a bot, so you get extra challenges.
Or google knows you will out up with it and want the most interaction it can get from you.
Google’s just lonely 🥺👉👈
Yeah exactly
STOP BEING SNEAKY MICHAEL
Cries in battlenet sign up process
The one reason I tried to create an account and never came back
I tried to order some components on Digikey a few months ago and I’m still mentally scarred. Probably did a few hundred of those things over the course of 2 weeks.
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That’s because you’re shady.
They knew I was committing crimes with my adblocker.
The worst kind - crimes against profit!
Elon musk wants to know what the government is going to do about you not viewing ads on Xitter
Not going to his shithole website.
Had this when at uni, mostly due to the amount of requests coming from a single IP
Im surprised that this is in the news right now. This has been acknowledged as fact for a decade or so.
Relevant 1053
Lots of lucky ones i guess
I still don’t get this one even after being linked to it so many times 😌🤣
Things that are common knowledge for you is not common knowledge for everyone and vice versa.
Instead of making fun of people for not knowing things, you should take the opportunity to teach so that you can get these fun moments of discovery and learning.
😮l made fun of people that did not know something?
No, I explained what the comic is trying to convey.
Just answering your question.
❤️
Someday you will, and you’ll be one of the lucky 10.000 that day.
😆👌🏻
Funny thing is they stop asking if you do them really slowly. Almost as if to tell you, you‘re too inefficient to even be an unpaid intern or something. Anyway, if they annoy you, take your time.
Some captchas have also just gotten obvious AI training. “Click on the living being in this image”, “Select every image of the same object as in this example image”. And the images you have to select look obviously AI generated.
Heh, I got one just the other day “Select the images containing structures built by people” lmao
“click on all people not helping with the robot uprising”
Alas, I have but one up-vote. :~(
Those one answers incorrectly.
At a certain point I did like 10 of them, and then ended up closing the page, cause it never let me in, all because I was on a vpn
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The original reCAPTCHA from Carnegie Mellon University was helping to digitize books. It showed one known word and one unknown word, and if enough people answered the second word with the same answer, that’d be marked as the correct value.
It’s basically always been outsourcing labor while checking. I guess they don’t want to provide that service for free.
But now that it doesn’t work, all it does is attempt to source free labor by refusing to show what you want to see. Cloudflare’s verification doesn’t show the puzzle because it’s not trying to make money off you.
Also, the books one reminds me of 4chan’s attempt to hijack it. Wasn’t a fan of the way they did it, but the intent was interesting.
V3 of the Google one doesn’t always show a puzzle to you. In fact it’s designed to not be noticed by users at all. Whether that is successful or not is a different discussion.
It might well be if it’s being used, but the site itself still uses v2 a lot. I get the picture one a lot when searching things up.
That actually makes me feel all the more strongly that it’s just there to extract free labor— they have something else, but still use v2 for what seems like most purposes
the site
What site?
I assume it’s up to the website owner to implement V3 and not Google. V3 also has puzzles but only when it’s not sure. I rarely see capchas so I don’t really have anything to complain about.
I expect they mean the site google.com, because that’s been my experience. Whenever I get captcha’d there for using a VPN (which is getting more and more common), I always see the Maps image style captcha. Like 60% of the time it tells me I’m wrong anyway and I just give up.
Yeah my b, I get captcha’d for VPN use. It’s almost always the “train our self driving car” one, and it tells me I’m wrong all the time too. Very frustrating
Alright, I don’t use google.com
I believe in that for years and haven’t seen any evidence or even articles dispelling it.
Remember the good old days when it was just malformed text you have to solve? I miss those days. AI was complete garbage and they had to use farms of eyeballs to solve them for bots, making it a costly operation. We’ve now totally gotten away from all of that.
WE ARE THE EYEBALLS AND I AIN’T GETTING PAID IN WOW GOLD TO DO IT EITHER
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No it wasn’t… It was human-assisted OCR to help digitize books. Initially for Project Gutenberg, but then for Google Books once Google acquired it in 2009.
OCR is a form of AI.
Traditional OCR isn’t AI; it relies on manually-written rules. Some modern OCR tools use AI concepts (e.g. Tesseract uses a neural network) but they don’t necessarily have to. Getting humans to manually enter words is definitely not AI.
I had to deal with one yesterday that wouldn’t let me in no matter what I did.
So it isn’t even good at figuring out who isn’t a robot.
Solving too fast. I shit you not. Sometimes you have to go really slow. Like you’re 80 and can’t see very well trying to discern what’s in those boxes.
Fuck. This explains a lot of frustration I have experienced.
Why is that no news to me? How did so many people not know that? Should I have spread the word more, even if all people I told that where likr “yea, yea, of course, but, what can I do? 🤷🏻♀️”?
There’s nothing that can express my disdain for Google’s reCaptcha.
😒 We’re training its AI models 😒 It’s free labor for Google 😒 Sometimes it wants the corner of an object, sometimes it doesn’t 😒 Wildly inconsistent 😒 Always blurry and hard to see 😒 Seemingly endless 😒 It’s the robot asking us humans if we’re the robots
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.
Yup. I like Cloudflare’s checkbox, it works well and probably catches more bots than reCaptcha while being simple for humans.
How does that checkbox work? Does it just look at your cookies?
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.
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.
Yup. It does do a lot more than the checkbox, but the checkbox itself mostly does mouse movement and click tests.
reCAPTCHA v2 visual challenge images are all pre-labeled and user input plays no role in image labeling
That’s funny, because when I’m faced with this, I keep adding/removing one of the image randomly and it keeps accepting them as ok.
I like this strategy.
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.
I thought this was known since it came out. It seemed even more obvious when the images leaned in heavily to traffic related pictures like stoplights.
Google should bear the cost of detecting bots, rather than shifting it to users
how?
Yeah. Written by someone who doesn’t really understand the internet.
Considering the article states that reCAPTCHA v2 and v3 can be broken/bypassed by bots 70-100% of the time, they are obviously not the solution.
Then what is?
Maybe a billion dollar company has the budget to come up with something?
Looking at the numbers in this post, reCAPTCHA exists to make Google money, not to keep bots out.
I’d rather have no reCAPTCHA than the current state.
Hi it’s me. I work for a billion dollar company with a budget. We have no ethical ideas on how to stop bots. Thanks for coming to my tech talk.
Yeah, that’s about the way I’d expect it to go.
“Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO2. In addition, 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.”
There might be a tiny chance they’re not interested in changing things.
Something something free market?
“Google should bear the cost”
Google should shut it down and make sites roll their own verification. Give everyone a month to implement a new solution on millions of websites.
This is unironically the answer. You can’t make a general-purpose captcha solver AI if every website or group of websites uses a completely different kind of captcha.
I’m actually 100% for rolling your own… almost everything.
20 years ago I made an e-commerce website for a client. Looking at the code now I’m embarrassed how insecure it is. However, because it was totally custom no one ever found the bugs and it has never been cracked. (Knock on wood) that’s the benefit of not using a prebuilt solution that isn’t a target for mass exploits.
At what cost?
100% success rate isn’t even moderately useful if it costs $5 per pass. The discussion is completely pointless without a concrete, documented analysis of the actual hardware and energy costs involved.
how do you get the metric of 70-100% of the time?
the best bots doing it 70-100% of the time is very different to the kind of bot your average spammer will have access to
Did you read the article or the TL:DR in the post body?
The paper, released in November 2023, notes that even back in 2016 researchers were able to defeat reCAPTCHA v2 image challenges 70 percent of the time. The reCAPTCHA v2 checkbox challenge is even more vulnerable – the researchers claim it can be defeated 100 percent of the time.
reCAPTCHA v3 has fared no better. In 2019, researchers devised a reinforcement learning attack that breaks reCAPTCHAv3’s behavior-based challenges 97 percent of the time.
So yeah, while these are research numbers, it wouldn’t be surprising if many larger bots have access to ways around that - especially since those numbers are from 2016 and 2019 respectively. Surely it is even easier nowadays.
researchers were able to defeat reCAPTCHA v2 image challenges 70 percent of the time
that doesn’t answer the question?
researchers devised a reinforcement learning attack that breaks reCAPTCHAv3’s behavior-based challenges 97 percent of the time
i’d argue “bespoke system, deployed in a very limited context, built by researchers at the top of their field” is kind of out of reach for most people? and any bot network scaled up automatically becomes easier to detect the further you scale it
the cost of just paying humans to break these already at or below pennies per challenge
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We already knew that, but it’s nice re to have data.
Try the headphone option.
Finally heard a clear audio CAPTCHA for the first time in my life this past month. It was glorious. There was slight garbling before and after the characters were read, but that’s it.
Besides that singular experience, all audio CAPTCHAs have been utterly 100% impossible to interpret. Blaring white noise followed by a small squeak of “threeve” or “eleventeen”.
I’ve found them to be pretty clear usually. Half-formed words at start/end I just ignore. Either way, even on Firefox with uBlock and all the rest, audio captchas have always passed me first try even if I think I got it wrong. I don’t like posting about it in-case they tighten it up after it gets more users.
My answer to this is give one word only.
They were using us to label the data.
That’s why you always make sure that labeling is “garbage in” and label whatever
No one makes a company use reCAPTCHA.
