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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

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.”

someguy3 ,

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.

Bezier ,
@Bezier@suppo.fi avatar

they wanted you to do two or three and that’s absurd

Yea how about 20

radivojevic ,

That’s because you’re shady.

Bezier ,
@Bezier@suppo.fi avatar

They knew I was committing crimes with my adblocker.

msage ,

The worst kind - crimes against profit!

SpaceMan9000 ,

Had this when at uni, mostly due to the amount of requests coming from a single IP

Dudewitbow ,

if you have to do that many, you either have some privacy setting on or on a flagged ip given from a VPN

snooggums ,
@snooggums@midwest.social avatar

Or google knows you will out up with it and want the most interaction it can get from you.

crank0271 ,

Google’s just lonely 🥺👉👈

iiGxC ,

Yeah exactly

Landsharkgun ,

Well yah of course I do. Why the hell is that ‘abnormal’?

Kusimulkku ,

STOP BEING SNEAKY MICHAEL

ArmoredThirteen ,

Cries in battlenet sign up process

Fisch ,
@Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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.

cm0002 ,

Heh, I got one just the other day “Select the images containing structures built by people” lmao

SkaveRat ,

“click on all people not helping with the robot uprising”

CosmoNova ,

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.

dinckelman ,

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

Churbleyimyam ,

Getting served a captcha often results in me closing the tab. I’m not doing stupid puzzles for you.

NOT_RICK ,
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

Do them wrong and then close out

tyler ,

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.

voxthefox ,

It’s why they ask you to do multiple, 1-2 of them are the control group, they are training on the others

tyler ,

You’re implying they give you multiple. I hardly ever get multiple, pretty much only if I ‘fail’ the first one.

MajinBlayze , (edited )

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 means is that only ones actually being “graded” are the ones bots can solve anyway.

SkaveRat ,

and it will show the images to multiple people

Rolando ,

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.)

AmidFuror ,

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.

hddsx ,

I do it right and it says I’m wrong =\

Gormadt ,
@Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I have bad news for you friend…

You might be a robot

hddsx ,

What do you mean? I am a fleshy human and do fleshy human things like being made of flesh.

snooggums ,
@snooggums@midwest.social avatar

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.

polonius-rex ,

Google should bear the cost of detecting bots, rather than shifting it to users

how?

radivojevic ,

Yeah. Written by someone who doesn’t really understand the internet.

siph ,

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.

Chozo ,

Then what is?

siph ,

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.

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

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.

Anti_Iridium ,

Something something free market?

siph ,

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.

polonius-rex ,

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

siph ,

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.

polonius-rex ,

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

conciselyverbose ,

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.

radivojevic ,

This is bullshit. Author is literally insane.

Mubelotix ,
@Mubelotix@jlai.lu avatar

I bypassed 35000 google recaptcha v2 using bots. Don’t ever rely on this for security

theherk ,

It is neither intended nor even stated to be intended for security.

Gizmokid2005 ,

Except, that’s most of its ad copy on Google’s own website?

reCAPTCHA uses an advanced risk analysis engine and adaptive challenges to keep malicious software from engaging in abusive activities on your website. Meanwhile, legitimate users will be able to login, make purchases, view pages, or create accounts and fake users will be blocked.

It’s literally billed as a security measure for a website.

www.google.com/recaptcha/about/

cygnus ,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

Gonna have to disagree hard with this, based on extensive first-hand experience (web dev). I’ve added CAPTCHA to dozens (hundreds?) of web forms, and it all but eliminates spam.

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

It works against basic bots, but if you’ve got a dedicated adversary, it doesn’t do anything

(Granted, most people do not have dedicated adversaries, but when they come, you’re in trouble)

cygnus ,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

OK, sure, but that’s like saying it’s pointless to use a secure password online because the NSA could hack you if they wanted to.

wreckedcarzz ,
@wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world avatar

I thought this was old news 20 years ago?

snooggums ,
@snooggums@midwest.social avatar

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.

daniskarma , (edited )

I don’t really get where this article is going. They are all over the place.

Let’s start with a fuck google. They are a evil company. But:

  • Other captchas are also not very effective against bots. Arguably most traditional systems would be worst that recaptcha at fighting bots.
  • Recaptcha agent validation while a privacy violation is faster than solving any other captcha and if you are hit with the puzzle is not that much more time consuming that every other captcha.
  • That profit number is very questionable and they know it. Anyway, that’s no much different and probably less profitable that most google services.

Also is ridiculous how someone can say in the same article that the image puzzle can be solved by bots 100% of the time and that is a scheme to get human labor to solve the puzzle. Am I the only one seeing the logical failure here?

And what’s the purpose of all this? Just let bots roam free? Are they trying to sell other solution? What’s the point?

I hate google as much as the next guy. But I don’t really share this article spirit.

If I were to make a point. They point will be that people and companies should stop making registration only sites and dynamic sites when static websites are enough for their purposes. And only go for registration or other bot-vulnerable kind of sites of there is no way around it. But if you need to make a service that is vulnerable to bots, you need to protect it, and sadly there’s not great solutions out there. If your site is small and not targeted by anyone malicious specifically you can get with simpler solutions. But bigger or targeted sites really can’t get around needing google or cloudfare and assume that it will only mitigate the damage.

But if anyone knows a better and more ethical solution to prevent bot spam for a service that really need to have registrations, please tell me.

conciselyverbose , (edited )

Also worth noting that Google has always been extremely open about the fact that they use recaptcha for that purpose. It’s never been a secret.

Their service to the website owners is the meaningful reduction in effectiveness of bots in places bots are harmful. The website’s service to you is the content that that’s being used to protect (and the stuff that has recaptcha on it is stuff like games where there’s a competitive advantage, things like search engines where there’s a meaningful cost to heavy bot use, and login pages where there’s a real security cost to mass bot use). I use a VPN, which increases the rate of captchas a lot, and I think it’s a pretty reasonable way to do things, personally.

interdimensionalmeme ,

When they slow fade in the picture, I add one more software engineer to my kill list.

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