CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

mox@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 days ago

CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

ThoranTW@lemmy.world · edit-2 22 hours ago

OP misquoted the article. It’s 819m hours, not 819b. A rough estimate of the average number of internet users was 3.6b over that period rather than 8b, hence the ~450x discrepancy.

819m / 3.6b / 13 / 365 * 3600 = .1726 (rounded to .175 for a cleaner number)

CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' that made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google