Captchas, the tests that allow users to access websites by proving that they are not robots, have reportedly saved Google six billion dollars in salaries.
We have all been confronted with a Captcha while browsing the internet. Image to put back in the right place, puzzle piece to insert, text to decipher… there is no shortage of tests to prove that you are not a robot, however a recent American study demonstrates that these tests have little reliability and would have allowed Google to train its artificial intelligence tools for free.
The math is wrong Google
The Captcha system has been around since around 2003 and has been widely touted as an effective system against bots. A system that comes at a cost: In the study by Andrew Searles, Renascence Tarafder Prapty and Gene Tsudik, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, we learn that in 13 years of existence these tests have mobilized 819 million hours of human work for a total estimated at approximately 6 billion dollars. Of course, Google has not passed this sum on to Internet users and has also made profits on top of it, selling this verification service to companies for 8 dollars for a maximum of 100,000 evaluations.
An insecure system
“If you think reCaptcha secures your website, you have been fooled. Furthermore, this false sense of security comes with a huge cost in terms of human time and privacy.”says Andreaw Searles, lead author of the study at The Register. Researchers from the University of California are formal, these tests, in addition to being boring and restrictive for users, would not be effective. According to the researcher, “the real purpose of reCaptcha is to harvest data and labor from websites”. Internet users work for Google for free. We may find these tests boring, but they are of capital importance to machines. If these images are entrusted to us, it is because machines cannot identify them, we are thus making them progress in the field of image recognition. This would explain why Captchas have become more and more complex and time-consuming over the years.
The Register finished driving the point home by reporting that researchers developed an automated process in 2019 that could bypass 97% of reCAPTCHA version 3 tests.
Source: www.frandroid.com
