When you log into your bank's website, you might be presented with an image showing distorted numbers and letters and asked to enter them into a field to prove you're human. These tests, called CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), are commonly used on websites to prevent bot attacks and spam.In 2007 Luis von Ahn had a good idea: why not use CAPTCHAs to help digitize scanned text from books and newspapers that computers struggled to read. His creation, called reCAPTCHA, proved so effective that the New York Times used it to digitize its archive of 13 million articles dating back to 1851.Google acquired reCAPTCHA in 2009 and used it to digitize Google Books and improve Google Street View by processing photos of street signs and house numbers.By 2025, reCAPTCHA is easily defeated by bots. Yet Google continues to offer it because reCAPTCHA has evolved into a tracking tool that collects user data and generates billions in revenue for Google, according to Chuppl. "Re-captcha takes a pixel by pixel fingerprint of your browser, a realtime map of everything you do on the internet.""The essentially get access to any user interaction on that web page," says Dr. Andrew Searles, a former computer security researcher at UC Irvine.Searle's paper, titled "Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2," found that Google's widely-used CAPTCHA system is primarily a mechanism for tracking user behavior and collecting data while providing little actual security against bots. The study revealed that reCAPTCHA extensively monitors users' cookies, browsing history, and browser environment (including canvas rendering, screen resolution, mouse movements, and user-agent data) all of which can be used for advertising and tracking purposes. Through analyzing over 3,600 users, the researchers found that solving image-based challenges takes 557% longer than checkbox challenges and concluded that reCAPTCHA has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of human time valued at $6.1 billion in wages while generating massive profits for Google through its tracking capabilities and data collection, with the value of tracking cookies alone estimated at $888 billion.Unfortunately, if you want to use the Internet in a meaningful way, there's no way to opt out of reCAPTCHAs.Previously: Robot outwits 'I am not a Robot' Captcha Select all squares with bots able to complete CAPTCHAs faster than humans How 'I'm not a Robot' checkboxes work Why Google's CAPTCHA images are 'so unbearably depressing' Google will defeat its own captchas for you