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Having to do free work for Google is more than weird for me. For this reason unless the page is really important I end up closing the tab. If it was for open se

Having to do free work for Google is more than weird for me. For this reason unless the page is really important I end up closing the tab. If it was for open service (such as OpenStreetMap) it would be a different matter though.

danso 10y ago
How is that "free work"? Automated usage can threaten a site's bottom-line, and even its existence. A site resorts to Google's CAPTCHA's service because they don't have the money to build their own detector. It's not a service that was free for Google to create. edit: Also worth noting that some of this "free work" that users do for Google is used to improve bot-detection overall. The comment to this blog post (the post itself, and its paper are great reads) is a nice example: https://security.googleblog.com/2013/10/recaptcha-just-got-easier-but-only-if.html?showComment=1407032409681#c2120495904244057201 https://security.googleblog.com/2013/10/recaptcha-just-got-e... Essentially, the user is complaining (and justifiably so) of being served the pre-Street-View versions of CAPTCHA; I had forgotten how bad they could get: http://i.imgur.com/01F2eES.png http://i.imgur.com/01F2eES.png
- annnnd 10y ago
  GP is talking about visitors doing free work for Google. Googel can use the results to train its algorithms - this is a big set of data and very valuable. Of course the site (and with it visitors) benefit in this exchange, so I agree with you that it is not entirely "free".
- dsp1234 10y ago
  How is that "free work"? The original recaptcha was used to help clear up text from book digitization projects where OCR couldn't understand the data. The appeal of this was that these works were in the public domain, and thus proper digitization of these works is a societal-wide benefit. Since Google purchased it, they've been using it to: 1.) Clean street view data for a proprietary product (Google maps) 2.) Build training sets for unknown ML purposes These are activities that Google could very much pay a group of people to do. Instead, through recaptcha, they are getting that work from the end user for no payment. A case could be made that it's not free for the owner of the site that deploy recaptcha (because they get value out of the service, and Google gets data/ML services). However, the actual end user who has to fill out the recaptcha does not benefit in any significant way. Since a recaptcha is an inconvenience to the end user, that user pays both with the time to fill it out, and the data gathered by Google. TL;DR Some people do not like that Google benefits from a transaction where Google is not a party, and where otherwise, Google could generate the benefit using their own resources.
  - danso 10y ago
    Recaptcha was not a free service. Or if it was, why did Google end up paying millions for it? And it's not free now, unless the engineers and scientists working on it are working pro bono. According to Wikipedia and the New York Times, reCaptcha was not developed for public domain works. Its pilot project was to digitize the NYT archives, archives which were not released to the public domain nor are fully available without being a subscriber: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html I'm not a machine learning expert but I'm going to laugh at your suggestion that Google could "pay a group of people to do". In the above referenced NYT article from 2011, recaptcha's creator says several million words were being processed by recaptcha per day. And again, have to disagree that the end user "does not benefit in any significant way". We would not be discussing this if Google hadn't learned from massive user data to iterate their captcha from distorted word mush to what it is today. Captcha was a serious drain of user energy and patience, that's why recaptcha was invented in the first place. And the worst captchas were tolerated because automated usage was a financial threat to websites that end users use.
    - eriknstr 10y ago
      I had totally forgotten how bad the word mush was. In perspective of this, I agree that we do get something back from doing unpaid work for Google, and that is a HUGELY improved user experience with the current reCAPTCHA like "click all the pictures of sandwiches" or "click the portions of the picture that has a street sign in it" compared to the earlier reCAPTCHA and other CAPTCHA.
      - wst_ 10y ago
        Which still makes you work for them. Just, instead of letters, you get a bunch of images to recognize.
    - dsp1234 10y ago
      Recaptcha was not a free service. It was provided a free service[0] (search free). I'm pretty sure that no one in this conversation is saying that the cost to run the service is free, and arguing such is a strawman. was not developed for public domain works. pilot project was to digitize the NYT archives While the original "recaptcha.net" website is no longer available online (even via archive.org). There are plenty of sources still available that bely this claim. that will help convert printed text into computer-readable letters on behalf of the Internet Archive[0]. The team is involved in digitising old books and manuscripts supplied by a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive[1]. "There's still about 100 million books to be digitised, which at the current rate will take us about 400 years to complete - Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon"[1]. The sources are from 2007, when recaptcha was first introduced. There are more, but I picked the first two by going back to the beginning of the wikipedia entry for recaptcha and looking at the supplied sources. This is before Google bought it in 2009. While I can't speak for anyone else, this is what I mean when I say "original" recaptcha. laugh at your suggestion that Google could "pay a group of people to do". They got a group of people to do it for free, which implies (barring salaries) that they could also get a group of people to do it for not-free. Thus the argument that people don't want to work for Google for free. Google hadn't learned from massive user data And when Google has met it's ML goals and decides it gets no further benefit from recaptcha? Remember, it's not a free-to-run service. They only continue it as long as they benefit. If recaptcha shuts down, it would have been nicer to have the fruits of that work available through something like the Internet Archive, than something like Google Books. [0] - http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/May/may24_recaptcha.shtml http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/May/may24_recaptcha.sht... [1] - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7023627.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7023627.stm
- mrighele 10y ago
  It is "free work" since I'm helping training Google's algorithms and I don't get money back. Note that the service is free for the site owner, but not for the end user, which has to invest his/her own time.
  - danso 10y ago
    A site uses captcha because it is threatened by automated use. A site uses Google's CAPTCHA because the site cannot afford to build a (effective) CAPTCHA. If Google required the site to pay to use their CAPTCHA, those costs would be passed in some way to the user. In other words, if Google's service didn't exist, you'd be experiencing less of the site, or no site at all if they chose to use a paywall that you refuse to pay for.
    - mrighele 10y ago
      I am not saying that the service is not useful. It certainly is . What I am arguing is that it requires the users to do some amount of work and so it is not free for them, and I am of the opinion that Google benefit from it much more than I do. Anyway, I am not completely against it, as I said above depending on the situation I make use of it.
      - geofft 10y ago
        It's the usual comparative-advantage thing, though. Five seconds of your brain reading something is essentially worthless to you (unless someone is paying you to read this comment), but of value to Google. The resource behind the CAPTCHA is of minimal value to Google (what are they going to do with an account at startup-of-the-month), but of more value to you. The transaction is mutually beneficial. The value Google gets from the thing they want, and the value you get from the thing you want, aren't particularly comparable.
      - Karunamon 10y ago
        The alternative would be you're doing different work (i.e. more intellectually demanding) on each different site as they invent their own CAPTCHA, and rather than benefitting anybody, it would just be an annoyance between you and the content you want to reach. IMO, this is strictly better.
- coroxout 10y ago
  I'll take the mangled words over the new version, where Google shows you a variety of photos and you have to pick which ones belong to a category. Does a sweet pastry count as a cake? Is this stretch of water a river, a lake or the sea? Are those trees I see in the distance on this photo of a mountain? Does the front of a restaurant or a veterinary surgery count as a "storefront"? As a British English speaker I had to guess at that last one, and some of the others seem culturally dependent too. Or, my personal nemesis, the ones which ask you to select the squares containing road signs, and there's always a couple of squares containing a 3-pixel strip of the very edge of the road sign, and you don't know whether you're supposed to count those or not.
dexterdog 10y ago
Your nut writing for Google. Your working for the site that you want to visit. That site doesn't want to pay to do its own verification.
jlebrech 10y ago
at least it's better than a CIACaptcha "please click on the terrorist on this photo"
Taylor_OD 10y ago
But you don't feel more than weird about using their search engine for free? I think of the personal data they collect from me and these types of things as my payment for their "free" services.
simonh 10y ago
Ouse a lot of free Google services like Gmail and Google Maos, so I don't mind helping to improve those services. I'd feel hypocritical otherwise.
- stephenr 10y ago
  Because you feel that data mining everything you do and serving you creepy-level ads isn't enough?
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    Is someone forcing you to use their services? Stick to DDG if you don't like the contract.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      In many respects, yes. Travel to/from the United States without some social media footprint is on the verge of becoming suspicious in and of itself. Benjamin "Mako" Hill has long since observed "Google has most of my email because it has all of yours". https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be... Facebook creates shadow profiles of non-member identities. It goes on.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      I think the point is that they're payment enough, no need to feel hypocritical for disliking the captcha.
      - bitmapbrother 10y ago
        People that project their paranoia on others are usually running ad, tracking and probably even script blockers.
        Ntrails 10y ago
bluthru 10y ago
I much prefer that to being tracked.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
goodplay 10y ago
I actually feed google false information (select rectangular objects when asked to select traffic signs, flat surfaces when asked for water surfaces, and so on). It'll probably be filtered out when aggregated with other users, but I like to think that I'm at least influencing it even if a little. I wouldn't have a problem if they'd open the data set, but I'm not exactly keen on being forced to work for free.
- arjie 10y ago
  So you'd do the work if it were not productive but not otherwise? Like, if they just threw away your input into the CAPTCHA after confirming you're human, you're okay with that? Or do you just hate CAPTCHAs on principle?
  - gnarbarian 10y ago
    this comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd7fE9_7_7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd7fE9_7_7A
  - Freak_NL 10y ago
    It's an ethical distinction for some. I am completely fine with a type of captcha that helps improve some public domain or free/libre licensed resource (e.g., proofreading words scanned from public domain works). I am not okay with helping some megacorporation sanitize their proprietary database or training their machine learning neural networks for free. As mentioned elsewhere in this topic; I'd much rather spend some of my free time to help improve OpenStreetMap (and I do).
    - arjie 10y ago
      But what if it's a generic captcha. It doesn't improve anything. Are you okay with that?
      - m_t 10y ago
        A generic captcha doesn't use the work done by the user. I'm not the person you're replying to, but I think I can guess what could be their answer.

danso 10y ago

How is that "free work"? Automated usage can threaten a site's bottom-line, and even its existence. A site resorts to Google's CAPTCHA's service because they don't have the money to build their own detector. It's not a service that was free for Google to create. edit: Also worth noting that some of this "free work" that users do for Google is used to improve bot-detection overall. The comment to this blog post (the post itself, and its paper are great reads) is a nice example: https://security.googleblog.com/2013/10/recaptcha-just-got-easier-but-only-if.html?showComment=1407032409681#c2120495904244057201 https://security.googleblog.com/2013/10/recaptcha-just-got-e... Essentially, the user is complaining (and justifiably so) of being served the pre-Street-View versions of CAPTCHA; I had forgotten how bad they could get: http://i.imgur.com/01F2eES.png http://i.imgur.com/01F2eES.png

annnnd 10y ago
GP is talking about visitors doing free work for Google. Googel can use the results to train its algorithms - this is a big set of data and very valuable. Of course the site (and with it visitors) benefit in this exchange, so I agree with you that it is not entirely "free".
dsp1234 10y ago
How is that "free work"? The original recaptcha was used to help clear up text from book digitization projects where OCR couldn't understand the data. The appeal of this was that these works were in the public domain, and thus proper digitization of these works is a societal-wide benefit. Since Google purchased it, they've been using it to: 1.) Clean street view data for a proprietary product (Google maps) 2.) Build training sets for unknown ML purposes These are activities that Google could very much pay a group of people to do. Instead, through recaptcha, they are getting that work from the end user for no payment. A case could be made that it's not free for the owner of the site that deploy recaptcha (because they get value out of the service, and Google gets data/ML services). However, the actual end user who has to fill out the recaptcha does not benefit in any significant way. Since a recaptcha is an inconvenience to the end user, that user pays both with the time to fill it out, and the data gathered by Google. TL;DR Some people do not like that Google benefits from a transaction where Google is not a party, and where otherwise, Google could generate the benefit using their own resources.
- danso 10y ago
  Recaptcha was not a free service. Or if it was, why did Google end up paying millions for it? And it's not free now, unless the engineers and scientists working on it are working pro bono. According to Wikipedia and the New York Times, reCaptcha was not developed for public domain works. Its pilot project was to digitize the NYT archives, archives which were not released to the public domain nor are fully available without being a subscriber: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html I'm not a machine learning expert but I'm going to laugh at your suggestion that Google could "pay a group of people to do". In the above referenced NYT article from 2011, recaptcha's creator says several million words were being processed by recaptcha per day. And again, have to disagree that the end user "does not benefit in any significant way". We would not be discussing this if Google hadn't learned from massive user data to iterate their captcha from distorted word mush to what it is today. Captcha was a serious drain of user energy and patience, that's why recaptcha was invented in the first place. And the worst captchas were tolerated because automated usage was a financial threat to websites that end users use.
  - eriknstr 10y ago
    I had totally forgotten how bad the word mush was. In perspective of this, I agree that we do get something back from doing unpaid work for Google, and that is a HUGELY improved user experience with the current reCAPTCHA like "click all the pictures of sandwiches" or "click the portions of the picture that has a street sign in it" compared to the earlier reCAPTCHA and other CAPTCHA.
    - wst_ 10y ago
      Which still makes you work for them. Just, instead of letters, you get a bunch of images to recognize.
  - dsp1234 10y ago
    Recaptcha was not a free service. It was provided a free service[0] (search free). I'm pretty sure that no one in this conversation is saying that the cost to run the service is free, and arguing such is a strawman. was not developed for public domain works. pilot project was to digitize the NYT archives While the original "recaptcha.net" website is no longer available online (even via archive.org). There are plenty of sources still available that bely this claim. that will help convert printed text into computer-readable letters on behalf of the Internet Archive[0]. The team is involved in digitising old books and manuscripts supplied by a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive[1]. "There's still about 100 million books to be digitised, which at the current rate will take us about 400 years to complete - Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon"[1]. The sources are from 2007, when recaptcha was first introduced. There are more, but I picked the first two by going back to the beginning of the wikipedia entry for recaptcha and looking at the supplied sources. This is before Google bought it in 2009. While I can't speak for anyone else, this is what I mean when I say "original" recaptcha. laugh at your suggestion that Google could "pay a group of people to do". They got a group of people to do it for free, which implies (barring salaries) that they could also get a group of people to do it for not-free. Thus the argument that people don't want to work for Google for free. Google hadn't learned from massive user data And when Google has met it's ML goals and decides it gets no further benefit from recaptcha? Remember, it's not a free-to-run service. They only continue it as long as they benefit. If recaptcha shuts down, it would have been nicer to have the fruits of that work available through something like the Internet Archive, than something like Google Books. [0] - http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/May/may24_recaptcha.shtml http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/May/may24_recaptcha.sht... [1] - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7023627.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7023627.stm
mrighele 10y ago
It is "free work" since I'm helping training Google's algorithms and I don't get money back. Note that the service is free for the site owner, but not for the end user, which has to invest his/her own time.
- danso 10y ago
  A site uses captcha because it is threatened by automated use. A site uses Google's CAPTCHA because the site cannot afford to build a (effective) CAPTCHA. If Google required the site to pay to use their CAPTCHA, those costs would be passed in some way to the user. In other words, if Google's service didn't exist, you'd be experiencing less of the site, or no site at all if they chose to use a paywall that you refuse to pay for.
  - mrighele 10y ago
    I am not saying that the service is not useful. It certainly is . What I am arguing is that it requires the users to do some amount of work and so it is not free for them, and I am of the opinion that Google benefit from it much more than I do. Anyway, I am not completely against it, as I said above depending on the situation I make use of it.
    - geofft 10y ago
      It's the usual comparative-advantage thing, though. Five seconds of your brain reading something is essentially worthless to you (unless someone is paying you to read this comment), but of value to Google. The resource behind the CAPTCHA is of minimal value to Google (what are they going to do with an account at startup-of-the-month), but of more value to you. The transaction is mutually beneficial. The value Google gets from the thing they want, and the value you get from the thing you want, aren't particularly comparable.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      The alternative would be you're doing different work (i.e. more intellectually demanding) on each different site as they invent their own CAPTCHA, and rather than benefitting anybody, it would just be an annoyance between you and the content you want to reach. IMO, this is strictly better.
coroxout 10y ago
I'll take the mangled words over the new version, where Google shows you a variety of photos and you have to pick which ones belong to a category. Does a sweet pastry count as a cake? Is this stretch of water a river, a lake or the sea? Are those trees I see in the distance on this photo of a mountain? Does the front of a restaurant or a veterinary surgery count as a "storefront"? As a British English speaker I had to guess at that last one, and some of the others seem culturally dependent too. Or, my personal nemesis, the ones which ask you to select the squares containing road signs, and there's always a couple of squares containing a 3-pixel strip of the very edge of the road sign, and you don't know whether you're supposed to count those or not.

dexterdog 10y ago

Your nut writing for Google. Your working for the site that you want to visit. That site doesn't want to pay to do its own verification.

jlebrech 10y ago

at least it's better than a CIACaptcha "please click on the terrorist on this photo"

Taylor_OD 10y ago

But you don't feel more than weird about using their search engine for free? I think of the personal data they collect from me and these types of things as my payment for their "free" services.

simonh 10y ago

Ouse a lot of free Google services like Gmail and Google Maos, so I don't mind helping to improve those services. I'd feel hypocritical otherwise.

stephenr 10y ago
Because you feel that data mining everything you do and serving you creepy-level ads isn't enough?
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Is someone forcing you to use their services? Stick to DDG if you don't like the contract.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    In many respects, yes. Travel to/from the United States without some social media footprint is on the verge of becoming suspicious in and of itself. Benjamin "Mako" Hill has long since observed "Google has most of my email because it has all of yours". https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be... Facebook creates shadow profiles of non-member identities. It goes on.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    I think the point is that they're payment enough, no need to feel hypocritical for disliking the captcha.
    - bitmapbrother 10y ago
      People that project their paranoia on others are usually running ad, tracking and probably even script blockers.
      - Ntrails 10y ago

bluthru 10y ago

I much prefer that to being tracked.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

goodplay 10y ago

I actually feed google false information (select rectangular objects when asked to select traffic signs, flat surfaces when asked for water surfaces, and so on). It'll probably be filtered out when aggregated with other users, but I like to think that I'm at least influencing it even if a little. I wouldn't have a problem if they'd open the data set, but I'm not exactly keen on being forced to work for free.

arjie 10y ago
So you'd do the work if it were not productive but not otherwise? Like, if they just threw away your input into the CAPTCHA after confirming you're human, you're okay with that? Or do you just hate CAPTCHAs on principle?
- gnarbarian 10y ago
  this comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd7fE9_7_7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd7fE9_7_7A
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  It's an ethical distinction for some. I am completely fine with a type of captcha that helps improve some public domain or free/libre licensed resource (e.g., proofreading words scanned from public domain works). I am not okay with helping some megacorporation sanitize their proprietary database or training their machine learning neural networks for free. As mentioned elsewhere in this topic; I'd much rather spend some of my free time to help improve OpenStreetMap (and I do).
  - arjie 10y ago
    But what if it's a generic captcha. It doesn't improve anything. Are you okay with that?
    - m_t 10y ago
      A generic captcha doesn't use the work done by the user. I'm not the person you're replying to, but I think I can guess what could be their answer.