“We are currently running an experiment in which characters from Street View images are appearing in CAPTCHAs [the security system that Google owns]."
*facepalm* For the non-aware: CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". Google owns a company called ReCAPTCHA that supplies CAPTCHAs to websites that need them.
While sorting my cousin's Twitter account out today (she's clicked a dodgy link), I saw one of these new CAPTCHAs and thought it was weird, but hadn't realised what it was.
I don't have a problem with this. Websites need to stop bots, the best known way to do that is with CAPTCHAs (Though it's nice to see that Philipp hasn't resorted to them here yet!), websites don't want to pay for them, Google has work that needs to be done. The user and business have a nicer site, Google gets it's work done.
The photos are simply of a number. You have no idea where it is, it could be from anywhere in the world. I don't see that it's any different from when we where digitising books for Google through it. |