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CAPTCHAS are more than a nuisance. They're yet more Google spyware!
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/02/googles-anti-bot-recaptcha-acts-like-spyware-report-claims.html'Are You Human?' How Google's reCAPTCHA Secretly Harvests Your Data
Are you a bot that’s currently reading our website? If you aren’t, please verify your human status by solving a series of puzzles. That’s a scenario that most of us are familiar with. We go to a website, and before we proceed, we have to solve a series of puzzles or type out a string of random alphanumerics. That’s part of a CAPTCHA test to check for bots. Google employs something similar called reCAPTCHA, but unfortunately, it might be nothing more than spyware in disguise.
The Google reCAPTCHA spyware
YouTuber “Chuppl” recently published a video report that claims that Google’s reCAPTCHA v2 and v3 aren’t the safeguards against bots like we think. Instead, the Google reCAPTCHA system might be more sinister than bots and could be spyware, where it apparently tracks your browser history and cookies and sells that information to advertisers or other companies that are willing to pay for this kind of valuable information. In fact, the tracking data Google collects is estimated to be valued at a staggering $898 billion.
For instance, the reCAPTCHA v3 system, which only requires users to click a checkbox, might be collecting more data than we think. The system tracks mouse movement under the assumption that only humans can move a mouse, not bots. For the most part, that is true, but researchers told Chuppl that in addition to capturing mouse movement, it also collects user agent data and other bits of identifying information.
snip
However, researchers have found that these CAPTCHA systems actually do next to nothing to combat bots. A 2023 study by the University of California found that bots had no issues bypassing Google’s reCAPTCHA v3 system.
The Google reCAPTCHA spyware
YouTuber “Chuppl” recently published a video report that claims that Google’s reCAPTCHA v2 and v3 aren’t the safeguards against bots like we think. Instead, the Google reCAPTCHA system might be more sinister than bots and could be spyware, where it apparently tracks your browser history and cookies and sells that information to advertisers or other companies that are willing to pay for this kind of valuable information. In fact, the tracking data Google collects is estimated to be valued at a staggering $898 billion.
For instance, the reCAPTCHA v3 system, which only requires users to click a checkbox, might be collecting more data than we think. The system tracks mouse movement under the assumption that only humans can move a mouse, not bots. For the most part, that is true, but researchers told Chuppl that in addition to capturing mouse movement, it also collects user agent data and other bits of identifying information.
snip
However, researchers have found that these CAPTCHA systems actually do next to nothing to combat bots. A 2023 study by the University of California found that bots had no issues bypassing Google’s reCAPTCHA v3 system.
Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2
https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10911