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

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.

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