It used to be that I never had to fill out reCAPTCHAs, but now I get prompted almost 100% of the time, even when I am logged in to my Google account. I'm not doing anything unusual, and the only other person on our home internet is my wife. (Besides, I still get prompted to fill them out on other internet connections anyway.) Some of them take up a minute or two, especially the image segmentation ones (apparently I disagree with the general population on where the dividing lines should be).
Is there anything I can do about this? I'm being held hostage for about 20 minutes a day to help train Google's AIs. I used to think CAPTCHA was excellent - we were fixing up OCR from books and allowing the library of congress to be digitized and available to all. This gradually morphed, and now (as I understand it) the benefits from this human training are kept locked behind Google's walls. If they at least released the resulting dataset it wouldn't bother me as much.
I mean, the reason this works is generally because there is some information which Google does not have, that's why they are asking you to provide it. So, for instance, in the case of words, they used to present two words which were scanned in, one which they knew was correct and one which they didn't know. As long as you enter the one they know correctly, they assume you've also answered the one they don't know correctly. (Maybe they do some variant of this, but that was the general idea.)
I assume they're doing something similar with the image segmentation tasks, so if you randomly select two tiles and click "next" there are some images where it actually doesn't know if you are correct or not, so it ends up storing your response and lets you through.
I thought I was getting crazy, glad to see I'm not the only one. I very much resent training Google's ai for free as well just so that I can login or send a contact form.
I manage IT for a number of small businesses, so I routinely reformat my devices and also monitor traffic on my network regularly so I am fairly certain there is no malware. (Well, to the extent that one can be confident, at all, nowadays.)
That said, the idea that Google can hold my time hostage in this way is concerning. The suggestions you presented are not feasible for most users. Who has money to just go buy a new phone because Google's reCAPTCHAs are taking up their day? Why should that be acceptable?
Is there anything I can do about this? I'm being held hostage for about 20 minutes a day to help train Google's AIs. I used to think CAPTCHA was excellent - we were fixing up OCR from books and allowing the library of congress to be digitized and available to all. This gradually morphed, and now (as I understand it) the benefits from this human training are kept locked behind Google's walls. If they at least released the resulting dataset it wouldn't bother me as much.