this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025

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Passwords

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Discussion of passwords, password managers, biometrics, CAPTCHAs, secret questions, MFA/2FA/2SV, or other factors related to user authentication.

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A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2 finds 819 million hrs of human time has been spent on reCAPTCHA in 13 yrs (arxiv.org)

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From the article:

“In terms of cost, we estimate that – during over 13 years of its deployment – 819 million hours of human time has been spent on reCAPTCHA, which corresponds to at least $6.1 billion USD in wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO₂. In addition, Google has potentially profited $888 billion USD from cookies and $8.75-32.3 billion USD per each sale of their total labeled data set.”

This means when a CAPTCHA serves as a barrier between people and an essential public transaction, people are being forced into involuntary uncompensated servitude. I believe this is a human rights issue.

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