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using people around the world to help them transcribe books, addresses, and newspapers (and street view stuff) without compensation.
It's being used to calibrate their image / text recognition software, I thought. Something that software has, historically, been very bad at, but with the amount of matches provided by captchas, itnhas improved dramatically.
NotThamesWater
reCAPTURA is all Google, and has been criticised by some as a source of unpaid labour. They are using people around the world to help them transcribe books, addresses, and newspapers (and street view stuff) without compensation.
I have been known in my pettier moments to do them wrong, as a somewhat futile attempt to stick two fingers up to them. Being google though, they probably learn just as much from me doing them wrong. Ho hum.