ReCAPTCHA: 819M hours of wasted human time and billions in Google profits

https://boingboing.net/2025/02/07/recaptcha-819-million-hours-of-wasted-human-time-and-billions-of-dollars-google-profit.html

by hubraumhugo • 1 year ago

76 19 1 year ago

boingboing.net

scotty792• 1 year ago

If Google knows that much about me how come it can't tell that I know barely any German and still serves me ads in German whenever I connect from German ip?

kees99• 1 year ago

A while ago, our office switched ISPs, and we got IP from a block that was previously registered in Spain.

Even though RIPE records were correct from day one (we're in the Netherlands), some databases somewhere took a full year to update. All that time, almost all ads were in Spanish.

tetris11• 1 year ago

It can fetch everything about you if it wanted to.

Fingerprinting every request likely costs them compute money, so they phone it in with an IP check for the humdrum stuff.

arccy• 1 year ago

google knows, it's just the advertisers that use their services don't care enough to filter audience by language (or think it's not worth it, sometimes images are enough to entice customers...).

pona-a• 1 year ago

It really depends. After going on a month-long trip, Google was serving me ads in German, as well as offering Google Photos printing expecting a German address with the price in Euros, all despite us never entering Germany, let alone staying there long enough for it to assume permanent residence. This continued for about 6 months after.

ZiiS• 1 year ago

Google shopping manages to show my local shops translated into a language I can't read just because by IPv6 registration is wrong.

mrguyorama• 1 year ago

Google doesn't choose which ads you see. Google says "These are the attributes of someone who deserves to see an ad" and companies bid on that ad space. That means that if the adult diaper company is ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you want their diapers, you will see nothing but adult diaper ads.

Supposedly Google has some internal processes to try and punish you if you buy ad spots that don't convert or cause bounces or something, but I find it hard to believe google would give up money from stupid businesses like that.

scotty792• 1 year ago

This just moves my question. Why would a company choose to advertise any product in German to a person who doesn't know German? Why they don't optimize their marketing budget if Google provides them with information to do that?

metalman• 1 year ago

If there is a "captcha", the only time I dont cut and run, is if I, will get paid through interacting with the site, grinning and hateing it. Vile, beyond vile attempt to force this obesience on people, litteral cowtowing before the robot, lest we be inhuman.....

lofaszvanitt3• 1 year ago

add cookie banners to this

"people in the ziggurats exert control on people"

j5r5myk• 1 year ago

Tell me more about this quotation

rvnx• 1 year ago

Most of all, this is free AI classification time

gruez• 1 year ago

At this point I don't think the free human labor is even worth anything. Object recognition has gotten good enough that humans providing input in the form of a 4x4 grid for vague categories like "cars" (are trucks cars?) isn't going to make the system any better.

catlikesshrimp2• 1 year ago

In the beggining, we were doing text recognition. We trained OCR by transcripting unclear scanned text.

RandomBacon• 1 year ago

Or given the average life expectancy of a human; 1,300 lifetimes wasted.

daghamm• 1 year ago

Wonder how much of that was wasted by poor Firefox users.

ReCAPTCHA: 819M hours of wasted human time and billions in Google profits

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