Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10911

From the article:

“In terms of cost, we estimate that – during over 13 years of its deployment – 819 million hours of human time has been spent on reCAPTCHA, which corresponds to at least $6.1 billion USD in wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO₂. In addition, Google has potentially profited $888 billion USD from cookies and $8.75-32.3 billion USD per each sale of their total labeled data set.”

This means when a CAPTCHA serves as a barrier between people and an essential public transaction, people are being forced into involuntary uncompensated servitude. I believe this is a human rights issue.