4 ms·

reCAPTCHA helps Google to digitize books that are too illegible to be OCR'd. Do you appreciate Google Books? It's not as bad as you're making it out to be.

unclebucknasty 8y ago
No, I don't enjoy Google Books, but that's really not the point. If that's what I'm helping you do then tell me that and let me opt-in. Maybe I want to contribute. But, don't instead throw up a road-block to the service I'm actually trying to consume, under the guise of providing that service, then double my required effort to help you provide some other service. It's actually implemented as a dark pattern. If you want cheap labor then use Mechanical Turk or otherwise. But, don't steal thousands of hours of your customers' time under misleading pretenses.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Google isn't providing a service to you, they are providing a service to the site that uses the captcha. And they haven't put any roadblocks, the site did - by installing a captcha. You should complain to the site that decided to offload their captcha costs to you.
  - unclebucknasty 8y ago
    Fair point. But, does Google have any culpability here, as the service provider?
    - icebraining 8y ago
      I don't see why they would. If some delivery service had an expensive pay-on-delivery model, and some ecommerce site decided to use it, but didn't tell you (the buyer) that they did, and so you got a surprising shipping bill on receiving the product, would you blame the delivery service? Your relationship is with the site, and so it should be their responsibility to inform you of the "bill" you'll have to pay to Google for using the site's captcha-protected services.
      - unclebucknasty 8y ago
        The analogy doesn't hold. For this argument to be valid, we'd have to pretend that dark patterns don't exist. And, Google is definitely employing a dark pattern here. This is designed to be a stealth tax, to go largely unnoticed by anyone, including the site operator. Even Google's selling of the product doesn't make clear that users will be doing additional work; instead suggesting that saving the world will be a by-product of a normal captcha process. [0] [0] https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/v3.html https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/v3.html
        icebraining 8y ago
        I agree that Google's description of reCaptcha is deceptive.
nacs 8y ago
This isn't true any longer -- reCaptcha used to help digitize text but now it's all Google Maps (streetview) images they're using to train their own self-driving and Maps software.

unclebucknasty 8y ago

No, I don't enjoy Google Books, but that's really not the point. If that's what I'm helping you do then tell me that and let me opt-in. Maybe I want to contribute. But, don't instead throw up a road-block to the service I'm actually trying to consume, under the guise of providing that service, then double my required effort to help you provide some other service. It's actually implemented as a dark pattern. If you want cheap labor then use Mechanical Turk or otherwise. But, don't steal thousands of hours of your customers' time under misleading pretenses.

icebraining 8y ago
Google isn't providing a service to you, they are providing a service to the site that uses the captcha. And they haven't put any roadblocks, the site did - by installing a captcha. You should complain to the site that decided to offload their captcha costs to you.
- unclebucknasty 8y ago
  Fair point. But, does Google have any culpability here, as the service provider?
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I don't see why they would. If some delivery service had an expensive pay-on-delivery model, and some ecommerce site decided to use it, but didn't tell you (the buyer) that they did, and so you got a surprising shipping bill on receiving the product, would you blame the delivery service? Your relationship is with the site, and so it should be their responsibility to inform you of the "bill" you'll have to pay to Google for using the site's captcha-protected services.
    - unclebucknasty 8y ago
      The analogy doesn't hold. For this argument to be valid, we'd have to pretend that dark patterns don't exist. And, Google is definitely employing a dark pattern here. This is designed to be a stealth tax, to go largely unnoticed by anyone, including the site operator. Even Google's selling of the product doesn't make clear that users will be doing additional work; instead suggesting that saving the world will be a by-product of a normal captcha process. [0] [0] https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/v3.html https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/v3.html
      - icebraining 8y ago
        I agree that Google's description of reCaptcha is deceptive.

nacs 8y ago

This isn't true any longer -- reCaptcha used to help digitize text but now it's all Google Maps (streetview) images they're using to train their own self-driving and Maps software.