- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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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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.
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
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.
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
Had this when at uni, mostly due to the amount of requests coming from a single IP
STOP BEING SNEAKY MICHAEL
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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.
Im surprised that this is in the news right now. This has been acknowledged as fact for a decade or so.
Relevant 1053
I still don’t get this one even after being linked to it so many times 😌🤣
Someday you will, and you’ll be one of the lucky 10.000 that day.
😆👌🏻
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?
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
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.
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.
and it will show the images to multiple people
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.
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.
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.)
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 bypassed 35000 google recaptcha v2 using bots. Don’t ever rely on this for security
Where can I learn this power?
I just spent 3$ worth of bitcoin on NoCaptchaAI. I used their web extension on a server which had a browser opened and controlled by a custom webextension I made so that a solved challenge would be returned to a swarm of clients upon request
It is neither intended nor even stated to be intended for security.
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.
I see your perspective, but I don’t consider that security in the context of software, which may also explain why they don’t use that word, though I readily admit that it is technically security of a sort. The term usually implies authentication, authorization, and isolation.
I mean, except they do. Just because their simple ad copy omits it, doesn’t mean that’s not what they’re implying. It’s literally listed as one of their security products and also uses the term to talk about demos
I’m sorry I wasn’t more agreeable. You’re absolutely correct. I take it back.
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
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.
“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.
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
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.
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Try the headphone option.
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:
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Other captchas are also not very effective against bots. Arguably most traditional systems would be worst that recaptcha at fighting bots.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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? 🤷🏻♀️”?
No one makes a company use reCAPTCHA.
reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit
Well duh.
reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google’s own AI models and services.
If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community’s concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.
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.
I honestly thought it was common knowledge that these things were essentially free labor for training AI.
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.
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.
My experience matches yours. I don’t enjoy putting recapcha v3 on my sites but it takes contact form spam from 70-80 messages per day to 0-2.
I’d switch to other services if they could be as effective. If anybody has real-world experience with another option working I’d love to hear it.
Right, so similar to locks? Usually can be easily bypassed if you know how, but it at least filters out the people who aren’t determined enough to put in the effort.
Basically, yeah. The vast majority of spambots are simple and lazy.
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.
I thought this was old news 20 years ago?
