CAPTCHA Example

My thoughts for this post originally came a few years ago, while watching TechTV. There was a discussion on there about new uses for CAPTCHAs beyond anti-spam security.  What CAPTCHAs are, are tests used in websites and other types of computing to ensure that responses come from a human and not a computer. The most common type of CAPTCHA on the Internet are those verifcation codes that appear to be poorly typed or skewed words when filling out a form. Because of the way letters and numbers are distorted, machines typically cannot decode them and fill in the form.

My thoughts were further developed after Silvia Federici’s discussion of unpaid labor and Autonomist Marxists during a talk at the Fernand Braudel Center a year and a half ago. In her critique of the Autonomists, I began to thin about how  this relatively benign form of internet security (which we all deal with regularly) involve the exploitation of labor in 2 ways.

The first way is the same type of labor exploitation that has been going on for centuries – using cheap labor. Symantec, for example, has noted the possibility of using human labor to develop CAPTCHA cracking bots. Then in April, USA Today and other sources reported on the decidedly low tech sweatshops that take use human eyes to crack CAPTCHAs. This phenomenon is not unique in the contemporary world-economy, in that the exploitation of human labor is still essential in production DESPITE the increase of hyper-efficient technologies.

The second way in which exploitation takes places is the way in which your labor goes into the perfection of CAPTCHA and OCR technology everytime you ‘pass’ or don’t ‘pass’ the test. In the same way hackers use human labor, CAPTCHA developers have sought to harness the manpower exerted by everyday users to increase the the reliability of OCR technology for digitizing print.

So what does this reveal about modern modes of exploitation? Is it more of the same? Are we cyborgs? A lot can probably be written on this, so I’ll save it for another time. However, in the mean time I want to say that ‘newer’ ways in which we are exploited by computer networks make movements like the rise of Pirate Parties important. I think it’s important to have politicians or people involved in politics that know something about technology and what is at stake in terms of privacy. In other words, people who don’t descrive the “Internets” as a “series of tubes.”

Popularity: 36%