CAPTCHAs don't prove you're human — they prove you're American
CAPTCHAs don't prove you're human – they prove you're American
Terence Eden remembers failing a childhood IQ test because he didn't know what a nickel was. Decades later, a Google reCAPTCHA asked him to click every image containing a taxi — and every taxi was yellow. In Britain, they're black. He wonders whether Google's algorithms will ever recognise a London Black Cab, or whether not knowing what a Twinkie is will get you labelled a robot.
Guess what, Google? Taxis in my country are generally black. I've watched enough movies to know that all of the ones in America are yellow. But in every other country I've visited, taxis have been a mish-mash of different hues.
- kybernetikos
Other common issues - crosswalks and fire hydrants are common questions too, and crosswalks are not called that in most of the world and fire hydrants look pretty different depending on country.
- swiftcoder
Even as someone who lived a long time in the US, I've failed a bunch of these on unclear definitions.
When you say "stoplights", is that just the lights themselves, or also the poles that support them? Is a tile that contains 1/3 of a bike wheel "bicycle" or "not bicycle"? Is a coach also considered a bus?
- KingOfCoders
It's just forcing US culture on everyone in the world. Also see Meta deleting IG posts and banning people based on US politics / morals.
- nirui
Major Internet companies are still American-centrist, after all, many of them are American platforms and concerns (if not only concerns) American interests.
Google for example, they provide CAPTCHA to train their own AIs. Since Google mainly operate in the US, it make sense for them to optimize for Americans.
Another example is Cloudflare's CAPTCHA page, which is created based on measurements of American/first-world networks. But if your connection is "sub-optimal" (a.k.a, not first-world enough), it is possible that you don't even get the chance to load the verification scripts before the server cuts the connection and force a page reload, forming an infinite dead loop.
I feel the Internet is no longer international anymore, especially after all the AI scrapers. Now days are the days of contraction and everyone is guarding their own boring little caves against what they've defined as "thievery/stealing", while putting very little effort into actual useful thing such as gaining market and user (a.k.a expansion). The CAPTCHA implements maybe a sickness of it.
- dgellow
At this point I assume the captcha puzzle isn’t the actual check, just a distraction while they fingerprint your browser and behaviour to try to identify if you are more likely a human or not. Just my thoughts, I have absolutely no proof that’s the case, but I don’t believe labeling traffic light is still valuable, we are way, way past that