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CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

Is that good?

As reported by Boing Boing, a 2023 study out of UC Irvine, " Dazed and Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2" concluded that not only are CAPTCHAs ineffective at actually preventing bot traffic, they introduce privacy concerns through tracking cookies, have wasted millions of hours of our collective time, and generated nearly a trillion dollars worth of data for Google, which acquired the ubiquitous reCAPTCHA utility back in 2009. The study also noted variations in completion time across education disciplines, experience level, and for whether they were creating or recovering an account. "It can be concluded that the true purpose of reCAPTCHAv2 is as a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service," the researchers stated in the final portion of the study, arguing that reCAPTCHA should be deprecated for its lack of genuine contribution to the internet's safety or functionality.

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