1) Computer vision got a lot better over the past few years. It's also become way easier for the average Joe bot operator to run cutting-edge stuff. OCR tasks don't cut it for distinguishing people from machines any more. Every time I see a blog post about a new computer vision architecture or how some random developer trained a neural network to get an X% result on benchmark Y, I think to myself CAPTCHAs are going to get more annoying.
2) The frequency at which most people have to solve a CAPTCHA has gone way down. In the beginning, I remember having to solve a CAPTCHA every single time I did anything on some sites. Now, I can't even remember the last time I had to do more than just check the checkbox. So, the amount of annoyance is amortized over a larger number of sessions, and Google probably feels like they can ask the user to complete more tasks as a result.
I've noticed the opposite on #2, especially in the last year or so. I've been solving a lot more captchas than I used to. I run Firefox with a lot of privacy focused add ons and I don't stay logged in to Google, I wonder if those have something to do with it.
Yes, they most likely do have something to do with it. If Google is unable to ID you in some way (e.g. browser fingerprint, cookies, IP, etc) and determine you're a good Internet citizen, they'll assume that you could be a bot and offer challenging Captchas. It's annoying, but on the bright side it proves that your privacy add-ons are working!
Same here. When this highly advertized service was launched ('just a click!') it worked perfectly. Slowly, over the past couple of years, they deliberately replaced that wonderful service with another one where we act as Google's unpaid workers.
Captcha Data has been used to traon ML models for a very long time. What's changed recently is that simple stuff like OCR has already been solved and democratized so the simple puzzles no longer work.
I'm not talking about the simple puzzles or 'words' that reCaptcha initially used to show. I'm talking about their 'improved' way of testing whether you are a bot by just making you click a checkbox. That doesn't work anymore (most of the times).
I am also getting way more captchas at least since the last 6 months. Exclusively using Firefox with clear everything on exit, multiple profiles, fingerprint flag on, some addons etc. No VPN. I get captcha almost all the time, even for Google searches from Firefox address bar (one out of 10 searches I think). But never gets a captcha for Google websites (gmail, youtube etc).
2) isn't true at all for me. I've always loved captcha and it has become a huuuuuge annoyance as soon as I'm using a vpn, tor, a weird wifi, a non-typical device, etc.
It is so freaking slow. I sometimes lose 60s to complete a captcha.
1) Computer vision got a lot better over the past few years. It's also become way easier for the average Joe bot operator to run cutting-edge stuff. OCR tasks don't cut it for distinguishing people from machines any more. Every time I see a blog post about a new computer vision architecture or how some random developer trained a neural network to get an X% result on benchmark Y, I think to myself CAPTCHAs are going to get more annoying.
2) The frequency at which most people have to solve a CAPTCHA has gone way down. In the beginning, I remember having to solve a CAPTCHA every single time I did anything on some sites. Now, I can't even remember the last time I had to do more than just check the checkbox. So, the amount of annoyance is amortized over a larger number of sessions, and Google probably feels like they can ask the user to complete more tasks as a result.