Are you a robot?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the years, to help prove that we aren\u2019t computers while reducing spam, Humanity toiled to make sense of jumbled letters and numbers and pick images of buses, traffic lights, motorcycles, and bridges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, in the ever-escalating cybersecurity game of cat and mouse, the bad guys inevitably learned how to thwart our protective efforts. By the end of 2024, research had shown that bots had figured out\u00a0how to beat reCAPTCHA<\/a>\u00a0(Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) 100% of the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that we\u2019ve conceded defeat to our robot overlords \u2014 at least for earlier versions of reCAPTCHA \u2014 have you ever wondered how much time we spent on these no-longer-useful tests? The study,\u00a0Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2<\/a>\u00a0quantifies how the amount of time and resources we\u2019ve lost over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the report:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There have been at least 512 billion reCAPTCHAv2 sessions, taking 819 million hours, which translates into at least $6.1 billion USD in free wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHAv2 consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO2 pollution.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Note that the study calculates the monetary impact of wasted time by multiplying 819 million hours of labor by the minimum U.S. hourly wage of $7.50 to get $6.1B. If we were to use the current U.S. median hourly wage of approximately $35 per hour (the\u00a0median salary for network support technicians<\/a>\u00a0was $34.39 hourly in 2023) that figure jumps to around\u00a0$28.7B.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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