CAPTCHA Wastes Human Time

reCAPTCHA: 819 million hours of wasted human time and billions of dollars in Google profits MARK FRAUENFELDER / 4:03 AM FRI FEB 7, 2025 When you log into your bank's website, you might be presented with an image showing distorted numbers and letters and asked to enter them into a field to prove you're human. These tests, called CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), are commonly used on websites to prevent bot attacks and spam. In 2007 Luis von Ahn had a good idea: why not use CAPTCHAs to help digitize scanned text from books and newspapers that computers struggled to read. His creation, called reCAPTCHA, proved so effective that the New York Times used it to digitize its archive of 13 million articles dating back to 1851.

An article screenshot explains that CAPTCHAs have consumed 819 million hours of human time and billions of dollars in Google profits. The punchline is that a security test designed to distinguish humans from bots was repurposed to make people digitize old books and newspaper archives, turning everyday annoyance into unpaid labor and massive profit. It is shared as an ironic reaction to CAPTCHA frustration and the hidden cost of supposedly simple online tasks.

• @gentoomemes / 15904 2025-02-09