A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' that made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google
www.pcgamer.com
Is that good?

Not just tracking cookies, but browser fingerprinting.

Not just Google, but now Cloudflare.

  • w3dd1e@lemm.ee
    2·
    2 days ago

    Yeah you’re probably right, but Google doesn’t have a self driving car right? I guess they are just selling it the data.

    • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      2 days ago

      Google does in fact have a self-driving car. You may have heard of it: https://waymo.com/

      But captcha is mainly about fingerprinting users versus using it to train self driving models. Google is primarily an advertising company, so being able to track users’ browsing patterns is more useful to their core business model.

      • w3dd1e@lemm.ee
        2·
        2 days ago

        Yeah I saw that it was more about fingerprinting and tracking, but that it was also sold used and sold AI training.

        Also thanks, I didn’t realize Waymo was a part of Google.

      • Zaktor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        If you read the paper this is based on, there’s little reason to think this. It’s just supposition by the authors in an unpublished arXiv paper.

        Google already has tracking cookies for advertising all over the place. Capturing behavior on a captcha challenge is of little extra utility.