This community collects situations where people are forced to solve a CAPTCHA as a precondition to public service either from a gov agency or to complete some essential task like interacting with a monopolising utility company (where you have no choice of suppliers).
We are interested in the most oppressive forms of CAPTCHA, such as:
- graphical CAPTCHA
- CAPTCHAs that exclude some demographics of people, such as:
- people with disabilities
- Tor users
- people not executing non-free JavaScript
- people who boycott the CAPTCHA maker (e.g. Google)
- CAPTCHAs that are difficult to solve
- CAPTCHAs that are broken
Rules / suggestions
- Please mention the geographic location in the 1st word of your title
- Please mention whether or not there are workarounds in the body. Such as whether or not there is an analog way to perform the transaction.
- For discussion on #CAPTCHA in general, consider posting to a related community (see below).
Related:
- [[email protected]](ht
Members
43
Posts
3
Active Today
1
Created
2 mo. ago
-
CAPTCHA required @lemmy.sdf.org evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org (US, OH) People using the unemployement system in Ohio are forced to solve a reCAPTCHA (unverified)
I heard someone was forced to solve a Google reCAPTCHA in the course of applying for unemployment in Ohio.
I’m not sure of the circumstances but the user would not have been using Tor, so it is likely imposed on everyone. They said they were unsure if there was an analog alternative (during COVID).
-
CAPTCHA required @lemmy.sdf.org evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org (US) many states refuse access to lookup registered companies unless you solve a Google reCAPTCHA -- California for one. Others?
The Secretary of State (SoS) for most (if not all) states maintain a database of registered companies. This basic dataset is needed to lookup how a company is registered, their contact info, status, etc. Most queries have come to impose a CAPTCHA.
If you fax or mail a request for records, the SoS offices simply ignore it without even the courtesy to respond. So if you boycott Google, you’re fucked. The state makes you choose between access to “public” records, and witholding your labor and data from Google. Can’t have it both ways.
Unless you make a FOIA request, in which case you have to pay the state for the info.
This thread could be used to document the states that push this shitty practice on people.
-
CAPTCHA required @lemmy.sdf.org evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org (metapost) This community inspired by research finding that “819 million hours of human time has been spent on reCAPTCHA” in 13 yrs
arxiv.org Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2Since about 2003, captchas have been widely used as a barrier against bots, while simultaneously annoying great multitudes of users worldwide. As their use grew, techniques to defeat or bypass captchas kept improving, while captchas themselves evolved in terms of sophistication and diversity, becomi...
From the article:
“In terms of cost, we estimate that – during over 13 years of its deployment – 819 million hours of human time has been spent on reCAPTCHA, which corresponds to at least $6.1 billion USD in wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO₂. In addition, Google has potentially profited $888 billion USD from cookies and $8.75-32.3 billion USD per each sale of their total labeled data set.”
This means when a CAPTCHA serves as a barrier between people and an essential public transaction, people are being forced into involuntary uncompensated servitude. I believe this is a human rights issue.