I still couldn't figure out from the article how google supposedly makes money off of captchas. I had to go about 2 levels down from the article to end up at a long, drawn out youtube video and then had to search some more to find out the "I'm not a robot" page tracks small mouse cursor movements to see if you are human.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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And track you across the internet for ad revenue and… other things.
That is cookies I assume and probably data sharing between websites. I know if I look up something on amazon I immediately start seeing ads for related stuff on FB and on google.
The details are horrific:
- 819 million hours spent solving CAPTCHAs.
- $6.1 billion worth of our time at the US federal minimum wage.
- 134 Petabytes of internet bandwidth.
- consuming 7.5 million kWhs of energy.
- which produced 7.5 million pounds of CO2 pollution.
- This one's from the author of the article: putting the 819 million hours against the average human lifespan of 79 years, that's 1,182.7 lifetimes spent solving CAPTCHAs.
Compare it to some stats for some truly useless Internet services if you really want to make a point
Insane! Thanks for sharing.
yeah, clicking on the checkmark means you are giving them permission to view info about your browser history, and what you did on those sites.
For every site that uses it and reports back to Google for their ad money.
Really? 100 hours on average for each person on the globe, including babies, the elderly, and those in extreme poverty? That seems like a lot
It's over a 13 year period:
The researchers took the average completion time of 3.53 seconds across both image and behavior CAPTCHAs and multiplied that against a low-end estimate of 512 billion v1 and v2 reCAPTCHAs completed across the internet between 2010 and 2023, resulting in the following estimations of their impact on our lives:
It ends up being like, .175 seconds per day for the average internet user after some rough estimates
.175s x 365 x 13 ~= 830s per person over 13 year. Which is little less than 14min per user. Scaling by 8 billion people (which is way above the average amount over the period) that's 1.8 billion hours, which is 450 times less than the announced number
OP misquoted the article. It's 819m hours, not 819b. A rough estimate of the average number of internet users was 3.6b over that period rather than 8b, hence the ~450x discrepancy.
819m / 3.6b / 13 / 365 * 3600 = .1726 (rounded to .175 for a cleaner number)
Ridiculous, this number is clearly fake. Not saying that the highlighted subject is not an issue, it really is, but why lie about the number ? I'm sure the real number is impressive enough
I guess I do one or two a day on average, say 500 a year. At 5 seconds each, thats about 42 mins a year. I'm a fairly heavy user too. Recaptcha has been round for what, 15-20 years? So that's like 15 hours total at a rough guess..
I once spend at least 30 minute on a single captcha that wasn't working. Also warcraft for example has been played like 9million years or something. I know it's not really comparable, but it sounds just as insane
I’ve also left it open before as I imagine other folks do, click into something then get sidetracked by life.
The shit has absolutely destroyed the internet. they only keep getting worse, taking more time and making me feel more stupid. there is no God.
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