California judge has some sense, dismisses silly lawsuit

Feb 9, 2016 16:20 GMT  ·  By
Google dodges bullet after class action lawsuit against reCAPTCHA is dismissed
   Google dodges bullet after class action lawsuit against reCAPTCHA is dismissed

A judge for the District Court of Northern California has thrown out a class action lawsuit against Google that accused the company of intentionally defrauding users that were filling in a CAPTCHA field while signing up for a Gmail account.

According to the dismissed lawsuit's documents, a group of users tried to sue Google under the everlasting umbrella of a class action lawsuit because they were forced to enter two words inside a CAPTCHA field presented when they created a free Gmail account.

The lawsuit says that while the first term was useful in detecting if the user was a bot or a real person, the second word was not needed, and Google was profiting off users that were filling in the second word.

How Google reCAPTCHA works

We're all very much accustomed to Google's reCAPTCHA project by now, and at one point or another, we all filled in one in the past.

As Google has explained multiple times, the challenge text shown in Google's reCAPTCHA technology is actual words from scanned books as part of the Google Books digitization project, or real street numbers from photos taken by Google Maps cars.

While Google has been employing OCR (optical character recognition) software to translate scanned books and street photos into actual text, sometimes blurred photos prevent the OCR software from accurately detecting the proper words or numbers.

In this cases, the blurred data is taken and sent to the Google reCAPTCHA service, which shows it to real humans, and gets back a more accurate result.

Judge fails to see how Google is profiting off users

The lawsuit tried to argue that users signing up for a Gmail account were abused by Google, who unnecessarily showed a second word, after users had already filled in the first one, which proved they were real persons.

The plaintiffs tried to say that users should be paid for the time and effort put into deciphering and transcribing the second word, from which Google profited by incorporating its results in the Google Books and Maps services.

The judge didn't see it this way and argued that the one second that it takes users to transcribe that word is more than acceptable when compared to the years of free service the users get from Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Books projects.

If you want to read more on this topic, here's the lawsuit and the judge's decision.