Study Reveals 2023 CAPTCHAs Act as ‘Tracking Cookie Farms,’ Costing Nearly $1 Trillion in Revenue for Google

A 2023 UC Irvine study reveals reCAPTCHAv2 is ineffective, raises privacy concerns, wastes time, and generates substantial data profits for Google.

By Anthony Cosgrave

TLDR: In a 2023 study from UC Irvine, researchers found that Google’s reCAPTCHAs, rather than a great wall against bots, are more akin to a costly inconvenience for internet users, costing them time and privacy while generating big dollars for Google. This revelation raises significant questions about the true value of CAPTCHA systems in online security.

If you’ve ever found yourself squinting at blurry images of traffic lights and crosswalks, clicking away to prove you’re not a robot, you’re not alone. These pesky CAPTCHA puzzles, ubiquitous and time-consuming, have long been a thorn in the side of internet users. But a study conducted at UC Irvine in 2023 has now shed new light on their true impact. Rather than acting as a robust security measure against bots, reCAPTCHAs are, it turns out, more beneficial as data generators for Google.

The study delved into the two main types of reCAPTCHAv2: the invisible kind, which surreptitiously monitors your motions online and the image-based type, where you identify objects like buses or traffic lights from Google Street View selections. Both forms have proven more profitable for data aggregation than effective as security tools. The "invisible" reCAPTCHA, with its tracking cookies, feeds into Google’s ad-targeting capabilities. Meanwhile, the data culled from image-based CAPTCHAs is a potential goldmine for AI training.

Google’s massive tech engine, enriched by these digital sweatboxes, carries a hefty price tag in wasted time and bandwidth. Over 819 million hours have been frittered away on these tasks since 2010, with a hefty potential value of $6.1 billion based purely on the US federal minimum wage. And if you reckon that’s a friendlier number, consider that it’s produced 134 Petabytes of bandwidth and released millions of pounds of CO2 emissions, all signage points to a model desperately needing a rethink.

In a world where bots are now faster, if not always more accurate, at solving these riddles than humans, the evidence begs a critical question: Who exactly benefits from this perceived line of defense? Certainly not the average user, trapped in a digital purgatory of clicking on motorcycles and storefronts. Amid all the teeth-gnashing, it surfaces that Google reaps tremendous rewards from this system: a bounding $32.3 billion or so in dataset potential and tracking cookie profits estimated at $888 billion, just from 2010 to 2023.

There’s a certain bite to this, isn’t there? Like being caught in a roundabout loop you can’t escape, clicking on the mundane, while cash registers ring at a faraway land in Silicon Valley. We Irish folk, with our history of underdog tenacity and a fair bit of skepticism when it comes to giant monopolies, might find this worth a chuckle—or perhaps a hearty groan. Who knew our mundane CAPTCHA clicking was fuelling such a data empire? It’s enough to make you want to bang the screen in exasperation, but sure, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles, isn’t it?

And to leave you with a tidbit to munch on, consider this: back when CAPTCHA was first introduced, its creators sought merely to provide a stopgap against spam. Fast-forward and researchers are now calling for its deprecation due to its negligible contribution to real security. Strange when you think of how a small invention to thwart internet menaces slid quietly into the arms of Big Tech’s data-harvesting machine. Coincidence or convenience? You decide.