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As a user who's constantly clicking on the crosswalk or storefront images you can't help but to think that you're essentially working for free training Google's
by miguelmota 8y ago
As a user who's constantly clicking on the crosswalk or storefront images you can't help but to think that you're essentially working for free training Google's machine learning models by providing them with supervised data points.
- tracker1 8y agoThat's what ReCaptcha always was... it was originally a known and another unsure text blurb from scanned books/text documents. Now it's street signs etc.
- rococode 8y agoIt's actually pretty interesting to see how the captchas have evolved as, presumably, Google decides "OK, we have enough data to consistently identify this thing" and moves on to the next challenge. I recall the modern (non-text) captchas used to be cars pretty much every time. Then, the images started getting grainier as they apparently wanted to improve their recognition in different conditions. Then crosswalks and store fronts became quite common, eventually with the same kinds of noise distorting images. Now I've started seeing things like buses, bridges, motorcycles, bicycles, etc. It feels like they've finished getting enough data for improving Google Maps and have begun moving towards collecting data for their self-driving car projects.
- cmroanirgo 8y agoYep. With the possibility of almost uniquely identifying us on the web through fingerprinting... Google, of all companies is in the perfect position to know that my web request was made by me... And therefore I'm not a robot. You can only conclude that recaptcha is a ml training exercise.
- bpicolo 8y ago>You can only conclude that recaptcha is a ml training exercise. They're not secretive about it https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/ https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/
- DigitalBison 8y ago> With the possibility of almost uniquely identifying us on the web through fingerprinting... Google, of all companies is in the perfect position to know that my web request was made by me... And therefore I'm not a robot. The article explains that this is part of what reCAPTCHA does, e.g.: > Finally they combine all of this data with their knowledge of the person using the computer. Almost everyone on the Internet uses something owned by Google – search, mail, ads, maps – and as you know Google Tracks All Of Your Things. When you click that checkbox, Google reviews your browser history to see if it looks convincingly human. But your point is otherwise right in that it's used for ML training, which Google admits as another commenter pointed out.
- gregknicholson 8y ago> Finally they combine all of this data with their knowledge of the person using the computer. Almost everyone on the Internet uses something owned by Google – search, mail, ads, maps – and as you know Google Tracks All Of Your Things. Human [n]: Entity that uses Google®-brand services. — Google Dictionary, 2020 edition
- felipemnoa 8y agoMaybe, maybe not. From time to time google forces me to prove I'm not a robot because of unusual search queries. Either my queries are unusual or I have an infected computer. The thing is, it also happens to me on my iPhone. Or, maybe they feel I'm not pulling my own weight, seeing as I rarely ever click on adds. They probably need more monkeys to feed the beast so I get selected to train their AI beast. Edit: It could also be that I'm always running on incognito mode.
- CharlesColeman 8y ago> Then, the images started getting grainier as they apparently wanted to improve their recognition in different conditions. I'd always assumed that was noise carefully tuned to throw off one machine learning model or another that was being used to beat the captcha, sort of like this: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/2/16597276/google-ai-image-attacks-adversarial-turtle-rifle-3d-printed https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/2/16597276/google-ai-image-... I think it might be the same when they switch to other types of objects (like crosswalks or bikes). Someone's model got too good, so they had to change to something else. I also get the impression that they add delays to the tile refresh before they do that. I suspect Google now uses robots to generate captchas for humans, under the assumption their image recognizers are far better than anyone else's. They already have some very well ones for other products (self driving cars, street view) and lots of street-level city imagery. That would explain why their captchas are so difficult for humans to solve -- they're testing if you see things like their "AI," not like other humans.
- dylan604 8y ago>I'd always assumed that was noise carefully tuned to throw off one machine learning model or another that was being used to beat the captcha I was thinking it was trying to dirty up the image just like the lenses on cameras get dirty. What happens to the image recognition when there's water spots, dirt, mud, etc on the lens that keeps parts of the image obscured?
- scrollaway 8y agoThe images get a lot grainier when you browse over VPN or fail the first round. So I suspect it's meant to actually throw off captcha-solvers.
- jameshart 8y agowhat would be the training data value in getting humans to classify images you have clean versions of, after applying simulated noise? If you have the clean version of the image, you need to get that classified by a human - then you can throw noisy versions of it into the training set for your AI. You don’t need to ask a human, hey, I added noise to a picture of a yield sign. Is it still a picture of a yield sign?
- taneq 8y agoGoogle: spins off robotic car company Waymo, announcing public-facing robotaxi service launch in 2018 Also Google: "Our standard for 'what a machine couldn't possibly do' is identifying a stop sign."
- UncleMeat 8y agoMachines have been able to beat captchas for years and years. The point is that it costs money and that's good enough to prevent free and scalable abuse.
- TrickyRick 8y agoIsn't the captcha data used specifically to train that AI? That's what they did with the old one at least where it was used to train machines to read.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoThose really grainy images, they always seemed like they had to have noise added on purpose? It was like really badly processed film grain, but if the images were enlargements then wouldn't they be pixelated? Stuff you get now often requires cultural information, like "sidewalk" isn't a cross-cultural name, I'd guess almost everyone knows it, but meh. What classes as a store, is a lawyers office a store? Also, I seem to recall I had "click on all minivans"?? Not sure what one of those is, nor really what is classed as a car in USA, is an MPV a car [I'd guess that's what a minivan is?]? Do pedestrian crossing lights (green/red man) count as [part of] traffic lights? I've often wanted a short description of the locus of the terms they're using. Of course it never tells you if you failed, just gives you a further captcha, which it might have done anyway.
- kalleboo 8y agoThe fire hydrant one always annoyed me - in many countries stand-up fire hydrants are nonexistent or at least look very different. I guess they're banking on people having seen enough American movies/TV shows?
- kaybe 8y agoIt's not like the word 'fire hydrant' exists in those countries either, so some kind of knowledge/learning/look-up is involved anyway, no?
- tomatocracy 8y agoIn the UK we call them fire hydrants and they’re typically placed underground with a small metal cover in the middle of the road and a sign on the pavement (sidewalk for Americans) saying where it is.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dzhiurgis 8y agoRemember this belongs to Google https://patents.google.com/patent/US9407661B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9407661B2/en
- tushartyagi 8y agoAnd I find it equally interesting to think about what happened to Google Books project after half the world was entering text into captchas perhaps close to a decade? Is the project still going on?
- seventhtiger 8y agoEventually you will have to park a self driving car in a tight spot for captcha.
- arayh 8y agoI wouldn't be surprised if soon enough you'll have to play a mini-match of Starcraft 2 as part of REcaptcha to train DeepMind.
- gcb0 8y agothey stopped using the text because some forum campaign that promoted typing cursewords instead of the unkown word. they probably started showing cursewords on the rendered search highligths on google books. there was a decent write up from a whitehat showing the damage, but I can't find it
- ianferrel 8y agoCite? I can't imagine some forum has enough traffic to meaningfully screw up their data, and they don't tell you which of the two words is the unknown word, so you're just going to fail a lot doing that.
- foxhop 8y agoIt was very obvious which was which and you had a 50/50 chance. I can confirm this used to work and I always used a curse word plus the known word.
- jachee 8y agoSounds like something 4chan would advocate.
- Leherenn 8y agoIt was pretty big on 4chan at least at some point in the early 2010's. And the unknown word was always the hard one to read iirc.
- have_faith 8y agoThis was extremely common on 4chan maybe 7 or so years back I can't remember the exact year and it worked for a very long time before anything was done about it and everyone knew to do it. Google asked for two words and presented them as two different fonts. The real word that needed transcribing was always identifiable and you could just write what you wanted as long as you got the second test word correct. Much fun was had.
- darkpuma 8y ago4chan was doing it specifically with a six letter racial slur that's unrepeatable.
- forgotmypw2 8y agoDon't forget the bonus: all your forum accounts can be linked to your google account, just in case you didn't use your gmail as the email address.
- nerdponx 8y agoThat's what really kills me here. This is lock-in at least as bad as the Equifax situation.
- peteretep 8y agoSelf-destructing cookies is a solution
- mcv 8y agoNot if Google has collected enough other identifying information about you to determine whether or not you're a robot. But I'm kinda hoping that the reason I keep having to identify cars and store fronts is that my refusal of third-party cookies is causing them to have no idea who I am. But that might be the optimistic view. In any case, I wouldn't mind if sites stopped using recaptcha.
- rapnie 8y agoIsn't there a good OSS alternative for ReCaptcha?
- dfabulich 8y agoCaptchas inherently require some security by obscurity; they're not a good fit for OSS solutions.
- ummonk 8y agoThe Turing test. Have one of your ops chat with them to see if they’re a bot.
- mcv 8y agoI'm doubtful about any good solution for having computers decide whether we are sufficiently human.
- speedplane 8y ago> I'm doubtful about any good solution for having computers decide whether we are sufficiently human. Two questions: - Couldn't a computer just temporarily hire a human to prove there is a human involved? - Why are we using recaptcha or verifying humanity anyway? I understand stopping spam, scams, and fraud, but scraping already public data doesn't present significant harm.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoHelping scan all the world's books as part of a plan to make them freely available to all is much easier to get behind than tuning map objects for their self driving cars. Particularly when most books that were scanned never, ever showed up on Google books.
- CamperBob2 8y agoOTOH, succeeding at self-driving cars has the potential to save lives by the thousands.
- johannes1234321 8y agoAnd if they succeed to much they can monopolize transportation and thus mobility. Not a power I want to have in a private company. Especially not in a company from outside my country's jurisdiction. Where I can't have an impact via democratic law making process.
- thomaslangston 8y ago> Especially not in a company from outside my country's jurisdiction. Where I can't have an impact via democratic law making process. This is false. EU governments have already placed significant restrictions and fines upon US tech companies in the past. There is no reason to believe that they won't be able to again.
- yholio 8y agoThose fines are the perfect representation of the lack of control EU has over US tech giants. They are essentially opaque and impossible to inflence through normal regulatory and political channels so the only options are the big guns. You can be sure Google is not going to heavily invest in the EU tech sector under such adversarial set-up. There's a subtle blackmail here: we push the envelope as far as it goes and the EU can choose to submit or risk technological backwardness. It's a great situation for the US economy but a very bad strategical position for Europe.
- Larrikin 8y agoIdentifying text for public domain works that Google is making available online is much different than forcing the web to train their models for their profit.
- littleweep 8y agoI've been thinking about this a lot lately. Where is our compensation? It's our time and brain power training Google's AI that will one day be sold back to us. I'm really not into this.
- bonestamp2 8y ago> Where is our compensation? When you search for an address on google maps, that little tiny house number on the house was once a captcha image and now google knows that number so it can take you to the exact location on a map when you search for that number. Everyone helps train the machine so when they want something from the machine then the machine is better at finding what they asked for. That seems pretty democratic to me.
- lallinuo 8y agoYou might be interested what https://hcaptcha.com https://hcaptcha.com is doing.
- foxhop 8y agoWow thanks for this, I added myself to the waiting list. If you use my referral URL I get a bump in the queue: https://hcaptcha.com/?r=29d830be7540 https://hcaptcha.com/?r=29d830be7540
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoCan we get a hcaptcha pyramid scheme going, https://hCaptcha.com/?r=d6064d5f22b7 https://hCaptcha.com/?r=d6064d5f22b7 ...?
- hombre_fatal 8y agoI don't really understand the case where you'd use this. First, it seems tacky scrounging for peanuts from the users' captcha work. Or it's like a product/services website showing Adsense ads. It's a cheapening message to send. Second, since you make more money from more captcha volume, you're incentivized to maximize your use of captcha which is at odds with every complaint in this comments section about captcha. Most sites only use captcha to gate low-volume actions like register/login (e.g. HN). They created their own Ethereum token too which always puts a bad taste in my mouth these days. Finally, it doesn't address the upstream complaint that someone else is profiting off the user's "work" rather than the user. Though I don't find that complaint very reasonable. And a tiny fraction of a cent sounds about right. The truth is that users benefit from anti-abuse systems. The number of bots that HN's recaptcha on register/login has stopped is worth that tiny fraction of a cent to most users.
- charlietango92 8y agonot trying to be facetious, isn't that (half of) the point?
- paul7986 8y agoOne solution is to remove Google out of your life as best as possible. Personally I now use... - iCloud.com instead of Gmail - DDG for search though I do have to !g like 20 to 30% of the time for things like driving directions (from X point to Y point), local movie times nearby and flights. I still use - YouTube - Google Maps some as its great for getting distance between X and Y - Google News (is there a better substitute) - Google Photos (is there anything that compares) Hoping in time to rely a ton less on Google products.
- bo1024 8y agoNot a solution in this case - the problem is that companies like Cloudflare use these captchas to slow down your visit if you are using Tor or a VPN. In fact being logged in to google probably helps you bypass these checks
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWhat is it in particular about GPhotos you find incomparable?
- robjan 8y agoDo you have any alternatives? Something that works on most platforms and allows you to automatically backup photos as they are taken.
- tirpen 8y agoDropbox has had automatic photo backup for ages and is available on most platforms.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoNo, I don't, I was just curious -- I used to use Picasa and it's facial recognition was far superior to anything else I could find. Flickr app has auto upload from Android at least, I'd guess Flickr as Google photos closest competitor?
- sekasi 8y ago
- dawnerd 8y agoFor a while there they kept saying I was wrong and it would effectively lock me out of some accounts that required it. Recently it’s stopped but it’s super annoying how ambiguous it is.
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y agoYes, especially when they show you about 15 sets of images in a row taking 2 minutes to complete, clearly going beyond demonstrating you're human.
- chrischen 8y agoI think they only do that if you get the first set wrong.
- pipelineist 8y agoDoesn't reflect my experience.
- _jal 8y agoMore and more frequently when presented with a captcha, I've been deciding I don't care enough about whatever it was to want to exchange robot training for access. Especially if they pull that shit after I've spent effort on something (a comment, say) - I will absolutely walk away and not come back. Manipulative user-hostile websites can rot.
- steelframe 8y agoThe Cascade Bicycle Club in the Pacific Northwest threw me into one of these multi-minute Captchell vortexes when I tried to log in to my years-old account to renew my membership and register for one of their organized rides. I was already on the fence as to whether it would be worth paying to do these rides that I have already done several times over the years. That (ironically) dehumanizing experience pushed me over the edge. I didn't complete the Captchas, didn't log in, didn't renew my membership, and didn't register for anything this year.
- snarkyturtle 8y agoThere's an xkcd for that https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/
- hedora 8y agoI suspect you could replace the entire mess described in the post with: what's the logged in account's spaminess? followed by, what are the doubleclick cookies' spaminess? You could further approximate that with: "How much does Google's AI think this human's time is worth in future revenue?" I for one intentionally inject errors into their image classifier until it lets me in anyway.
- mcv 8y agoI'm now wondering if the fact that I block third-party cookies is the reason I always have to identify cars and store fronts. Maybe I should just avoid sites that use recaptcha.
- amelius 8y agoWho says it's for training? ;)
- richjdsmith 8y agoI always try and click one or two extra boxes that are wrong. Sure I sometimes have to go through and confirm extra images, but you know what? I don't work for free and so I'm doing my small part to bugger up Google's data set.
- pipelineist 8y agoI've recently made a discovery that pleases my petty side. You know how they usually give you several questions to solve, even if you're quite convinced you solved a question correctly? Turns out if you click randomly, they keep showing you new questions as well. If, after a handful of purposely wrong answers, you answer one correctly, they let you through. I now purposely mess up the answers a few times. It seems neither slower nor faster than actually taking the time to do it right, but it takes less mental load, and it makes me not feel like doing slave labour for a machine.