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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, how much of it grew up from a "human captcha solving" market?

Grew more from the medical transcription, call center, back office and general BPO market. Lots of literate people, a couple dollars an hour is good money - in these towns you’d actually support a family with entertainment and a maid.

No no I think he might be right, India had a huge underground captcha solving marketat one poiny

Huh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_outsourcing_t... The BPO industry in India was $7-8B annually in FY06 according to the article employing millions of people. Do you have comparative numbers for the so called "CAPTCHA solving industry"?

Nothing official but see

https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-indias-captcha-solving-...

I guess it's not entirely contradictory as it comes under outsourcing haha..

Also Im involved a bit in making automated captcha systems for.. ahem.. research. I've noticed a lot of the manual service providers in China have already pivoted to data labeling services. Most of them probably already have the workers, infrastructure, and pipeline in place, which is why I think original poster makes a good point

Meanwhile Google reCAPTCHA makes us label cars and road signs for free..

yeah cause we use their service for free

I've seen reCAPTCHA on services I pay for.

The services you pay for use Google anti-spam/bot-detection for free.

In exchange, we are exposed to a minimal amount of comment spam. If it's anything like email, systems like captcha prevent 99.9% of spam messages.

Besides, how often do you see captchas anyway? If you're not using super privacy / tracking protective browsers, they'll remain hidden for the most part, and the ones you see are the simple 'check this box' variety.

Because of how Cloudflare works, and how ubiquitous they are, specifically, internet users from a non-western country can get bombarded with recapchas. It is so prevalent and annoying that I had to resort using VPN (located on a western country), to avoid this nuisance.

It literally breaks the internet for me, I had to go through recapchas 12-15 times a day.

I would not take a bet that it didn't.

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