> I'm willing to bet if you record how long you spend clicking signs and lights on average, it's going to be more like several seconds than a few minutes.
How much, and at what odds?
The length of the average Google CATPCHA has been steadily going up for me. I haven't pulled out a stopwatch, but I do count how many image sets I go through. I basically never get through on the checkbox unless I've done one on another site shortly before. I sometimes succeed after one set, but if I don't it's consistently 3+. The worst case I've seen was 10 layers of slow-loading images without success, at which point I gave up and tried on another device. (If it had been a site I didn't need, I'd have given up after 5 - which I do fairly often, so I don't have an average count needed to succeed!)
I'm fully aware that average users don't have this much trouble, or people would be furious. But I also see that captcha ramps up to an extremely long process in the face of even modest privacy-protection efforts like not running Javascript or allowing third party trackers by default. (God forbid you're using a VPN for any reason.) It's not assessing your humanity but your familiarity, using the same fingerprinting tools as any site that wants to track you.
Spam is a real problem, and a hard one to solve, but I admit I'm hostile to Google's captcha. Partly because it really is a significant time sink for me. Partly because it lacks any progress indicator or fallback option so it's an indefinite hurdle to accessing sites I'm already committed to using. But largely because, despite what I really believe are good intentions, it's yet another force pushing people to give up privacy and even security if they want websites to work tolerably.
How much, and at what odds?
The length of the average Google CATPCHA has been steadily going up for me. I haven't pulled out a stopwatch, but I do count how many image sets I go through. I basically never get through on the checkbox unless I've done one on another site shortly before. I sometimes succeed after one set, but if I don't it's consistently 3+. The worst case I've seen was 10 layers of slow-loading images without success, at which point I gave up and tried on another device. (If it had been a site I didn't need, I'd have given up after 5 - which I do fairly often, so I don't have an average count needed to succeed!)
I'm fully aware that average users don't have this much trouble, or people would be furious. But I also see that captcha ramps up to an extremely long process in the face of even modest privacy-protection efforts like not running Javascript or allowing third party trackers by default. (God forbid you're using a VPN for any reason.) It's not assessing your humanity but your familiarity, using the same fingerprinting tools as any site that wants to track you.
Spam is a real problem, and a hard one to solve, but I admit I'm hostile to Google's captcha. Partly because it really is a significant time sink for me. Partly because it lacks any progress indicator or fallback option so it's an indefinite hurdle to accessing sites I'm already committed to using. But largely because, despite what I really believe are good intentions, it's yet another force pushing people to give up privacy and even security if they want websites to work tolerably.