I LOATHE THEM!!! They are the most stupid, annoying, time-stealing things you can encounter on the web, even more so than pop-ups for sports betting sites. I have to deal with them on so many sites whenever I decide to hide my identity with Tor. I know you're supposed to use Tor at all times to play it safe, but I just couldn't stand the ensuing insanity of ReCaptcha and would go completely mad. I mean look at the captcha in the article! The images are so grainy and at such low resolutions that you can hardly tell one from the other. Looks almost as if Google bought an old warehouse with a stockpile of 16mm FBI surveillance footage from the 1970's.

Most of the times you are presented with a literally unsolvable task. "Select all the road signs". Well, there is only one road sign, divided into a puzzle of 9 pieces!!! Or another favorite of mine, "select all the cars, click until there are none left". Sometimes I need 5 minutes for a single ReCaptcha because the items in the images are just unrecognizable, no matter how many times I click on 'reload'.

Now as for their supposed usefull purpose; I've seen dozens of other examples of captcha that don't occupy my precious time longer than a few seconds, and that don't require me to use a magnifying glass either. For example, a picture with lots of circles randomly assembled on top of and besides one another where you have to click on the one circle that has an opening. There's also a capture where you have to type a few words that are being displayed, or copy&paste a short line of text. I'm not an expert in the field, but I would posit that all of the above options are as bot-safe as ReCaptcha yet only take a few seconds to solve. On the other hand maybe ReCaptcha is indeed safer, because after all it prevents not only bots but also HUMANS from solving it most of the time.

I would like to propose a few alternatives. Yes, these captchas are hard to solve but at least some humans can solve them: