What a Captcha Costs Us

In the war against spam and bots, one weapon is the Captcha.

As an image or word or activity that lets us prove we are a person, Captchas have become more difficult. Commenting on his inability to get them right, one comedian suggested he might indeed be a robot.

Captcha Costs

Captcha is an acronym that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Alan Turing was the British mathematician that pioneered artificial intelligence and called it “the imitation game” (1950). We used to be able to group Captchas into six categories: text, image, audio, video, math, game. But now, researchers added four more slots: slider, behavior, sensor, and “liveliness detection,” that are dauntingly complex when we look closely.

Our first Captchas were distorted words with squiggly type:

Then, like our featured image, they became more time consuming as we searched for the rectangles without the traffic lights. We also might be asked to manipulate an image:

Our Bottom Line: Transaction Costs

When economist Ronald Coase, first described a transaction cost in “The Nature of the Firm” (1937), he was referring to businesses and property rights and voluntary negotiations. For now though, we can skip their origin and apply the different kinds of transaction costs to our daily lives.

Coase expressed three kinds of cost. Using the economic definition of cost as sacrifice, he said that we experience a search cost. When we look for a good or service, time is a cost because we sacrifice an alternative use of those moments or hours. In addition, the search could cost money or even battery life. Next, we have a bargaining cost that will be minimal if we know the result, or much higher if it requires the exchange of many documents and assistance from others. Then, at the end, we have an enforcement cost related to implementing an agreement.

We might “pay” the Captcha cost during the search, the bargaining, and the enforcement. Whenever we access online information Captchas cost us time and energy and the life of our technology.

Maybe too much?

My sources and more: This WSJ article starting me thinking about transaction costs. From there, this paper had a handy Coase summary. However, if you are really interested in Captchas, this paper wonderfully (or excruciatingly) summarizes their 20-year history.