Google Using ReCAPTCHA To Decode Street Addresses

smolloy writes "Apparently some users of reCAPTCHA have recently begun seeing photographs appear in their CAPTCHA puzzles — photos that look very much like zoomed in house numbers taken from Google Streetview. It appears that Google has decided to put the reCAPTCHA system to help clean up Google streetview images, and 'according to a Google spokesperson, the system isn't limited to street addresses, but also involves street names and even traffic signs.' A large collection of these has appeared on the Blackhatworld website."

Comments

Re:How does ReCAPTCHA "solve" new images?

[Anonymous Coward]

They give you two words to solve. One is an old, known word and the other is a new, unknown word. You have no way to tell which is which. To pass the CAPTCHA, you need to answer both and get the known one correct. Eventually entries can go from unknown to known when enough people provide the same answer.

Re:Um, what? That's exactly what they're doing.

[martin-boundary]

Yeah, the problem with that is that it can't work when most of the humans are robots. The robots will make guesses using standard algorithms, and their guesses will be pretty consistent with the other robots' guesses (which are quite probably the same robot in another instance). Then Google thinks the robot guess is correct, because it's overwhelmingly the most consistent answer. And humans who give the correct answer get marked wrong, because they're a minority.

It's quite noticeable if you use a site which relies heavily on recaptchas. For example, when you get a word which has old english S which looks like a modern small case F, you're much better off claiming it's an F instead of giving the correct answer.