A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' that made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

“Both are valuable to Google, with the tracking cookies generated by the former potentially contributing to ad targeting, and data from the latter being applied toward AI model training, either internally at Google or sold to another company.”

People spent an estimated 819 million hours on reCAPTCHA through 2023. Bots now beat humans at the checkbox. The puzzles still feed Google tracking cookies and labeled training data. The security service mostly serves Google.