This sounds like a conspiracy theory but I’d like to know more.
The study that they reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10911 [PDF]
They don’t seem to actually identify the cookies as tracking (as opposed to just identifying that the account can bypass further challenges), just assuming that any third party cookie has a monetary tracking value.
It also appears to be unreviewed and unpublished a few years later. Just being in paper format and up on arXiv doesn’t mean that the contents are reliable science.
It’s true. They make us work to identify data, we are checking for them not confirming, then they also track us.
Okay, this “$1 trillion” metric is a bit of a reach, and seems to be based on an arbitrary value assigned to an estimated amount of data Google has collected, and not actually $1,000,000,000,000 in revenue. It does not appear that Google has actually made a trillion dollars from CAPTCHA data.
It is incredibly obvious that CAPTCHAs are at the very least a way of exploiting distributed labor to train AI.
It’s a lot easier to determine the intent of this hed with the quote being closed somewhere. Just after “service” would have been my guess, but it’s a disservice to remove that and leave people dangling.
My larger issue is that when I’m faced with traffic lights – or, god forbid, motorcycles – this is performative nonsense wherein I’m supposed to guess percentage coverage on a given square without having been provided parameters.
At this point, CAPTCHAs feel designed to make sure you can never get through the first time, thus needing to continue training image models several times before I can just fucking do what I originally came to the site for.
