In Chapter 3 of my dissertation (tentatively titled " Becoming Users:Layers of People, Technology, and Power on the Internet. "), I describe how online user activities are datafied and monetized in subtle and often obfuscated ways. The chapter focuses on Google’s reCAPTCHA, a popular implementation of a CAPTCHA challenge. A CAPTCHA, or “Completely Automated Turning test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is a simple task or challenge which is intended to differentiate between genuine human users and those who may be using software or other automated means to interact maliciously with a website, such as for spam, mass data scraping, or denial of service attacks. reCAPTCHA challenges are increasingly being hidden from direct view of the user, and instead assessing our mouse movements, browsing patterns, and other data to evaluate the likelihood that we are “authentic” users. These hidden challenges raise the stakes of understanding our own construction as Users because they obfuscate practices of surveillance and the ways that our activities as users are commodified by large corporations (Pettis, 2023). By studying the specifics of how such data collection works—that is, how we’re called upon and situated as Users—we can make more informed decisions about how we engage with the contemporary internet.

This data set contains metadata for the 214 reCAPTCHA elements that I encountered during my personal use of the Web for the period of one year (September 2022 through September 2023). Of these reCAPTCHAs, 137 were visible challenges—meaning that there was some indication of the presence of a reCAPTCHA challenge. The remaining 77 reCAPTCHAs were entirely hidden on the page. If I had not been running my browser extension, I would likely never have been aware of the use of a reCAPTCHA on the page. The data set also includes screenshots for 174 of the reCAPTCHAs. Screenshots that contain sensitive or private information have been excluded from public access. Researchers can request access to these additional files by contacting Ben Pettis <bpettis@wisc.edu>. A browsable and searchable version of the data is also available at https://capturingcaptcha.com

I developed a custom Google Chrome extension which detects when a page contains a reCAPTCHA and prompts the user to save a screenshot or screen recording while also collecting basic metadata. During Summer 2022, I began work on this website to collate and present the screen captures that I save throughout the year. The purpose of collecting these examples of websites where reCAPTCHAs appear is to understand how this Web element is situated within websites and presented to users, along with sketching out the frequency of their use and on what kinds of websites. Given that I will only be collecting records of my own interactions with reCAPTCHAs, this will not be a comprehensive sample that I can generalize as representative of all Web users. Though my experiences of the reCAPTCHA will differ from those of any other person, this collection will nevertheless be useful for demonstrating how the interface element may be embedded within websites and presented to users. Following Niels Brügger’s descriptions of Web history methods, these screen capture techniques provide an effective way to preserve a portion of the Web as it was actually encountered by a person, as opposed to methods such as automated scraping. Therefore my dissertation offers a methodological contribution to Web historians by demonstrating a technique for identifying and preserving a representation of one Web element within a page, as opposed to focusing an analysis on a whole page or entire website.

The browser extension is configured to store data in a cloud-based document database running in MongoDB Atlas. Any screenshots or video recordings are uploaded to a Google Cloud Storage bucket. Both the database and cloud storage bucket are private and are restricted from direct access. The data and screenshots are viewable and searchable at https://capturingcaptcha.com. This data set represents an export of the database as of June 10, 2024. After this date, it is possible that data collection will be resumed, causing more information to be displayed in the online website. 

The data was exported from the database to a single JSON file (lines format) using the mongoexport command line tool:

mongoexport --uri mongodb+srv://[database-url].mongodb.net/production --collection submissions --out captcha-out.json --username [databaseuser]