Hacker News Reader

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/how-security-captchas-crowdsour... (Not the best source perhaps, but I just picked one among dozens) It's not a conspiracy theory, it's actually true that captchas are used as data for self-driving car algorithms, and that the data would be useless unless it was relevant to things those cars are likely to encounter. The reason they're so common is they are distributed for free, for the same reason: more data. I often feel like I ought to get paid when presented with an annoyingly long queue of them.

Given Google tracks everything about me, there's no reason why they can't find-and-replace "crosswalk" with "zebra crossing" to match my locale. Its not a conspiracy, its just laziness on Google's part

What conspiracy? Google has been rather open about this for years.