
Google Now Using ReCAPTCHA To Decode Street View Addresses  - wglb
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-to-decode-street-view-addresses/
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DavidChouinard
Slightly related, but if you haven't yet seen Luis von Ahn's TED talk on
reCAPTCHA, I recommend it highly:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_c...](http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html)

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pbreit
I'm really not a fan of captchas in general and Recaptcha in particular.
Captchas are user hostile enough, benefiting the service provider at the
user's expense. Recaptcha is worse because it is even more of a drag on the
user and now also benefits Google.

I run across a lot of captchas where I would be very surprised if the site
owner actually had a problem being addressed by the captcha.

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pittsburgh
As a developer, I agree that captchas can be a drag on users, and I think we
should put serious thought into whether or not their UX-cost is justified.
Personally, I try to avoid using them on sites I build.

That said, as a user, it's hard to hate ReCaptcha after hearing Luis von Ahn
talk about and defend his invention:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ht4qiDRZE8>

It's a clever way to digitize books (and now street signs) while keeping out
spambots, and when I combine that knowledge with my affinity for Luis von Ahn
as a person I find myself less annoyed every time I have to prove I'm not a
robot.

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a3_nm
> It's a clever way to digitize books (and now street signs)

It used to be a cool idea when it benefited everyone, because it was used to
ditigize public domain books that everyone could retrieve. Now, it's only a
clever way for Google to use your brain to do stuff for their own purposes.

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smackfu
Many of those in the examples at the bottom look like trivial work for OCR.

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nkassis
Could be to see how reliable the results are for the experiment or the OCR I
guess. How well they agree.

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notatoad
I think everybody might be looking at this backwards. Google already has very
precise gps-correlated maps and street view data, it doesn't seem like they
would need our help to determine street addresses.

Recaptcha pairs a known with an unknown to verify, maybe the addresses are the
known factor.

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hbar
Usually if I input an address into Google maps, it places a marker somewhere
near the actual address. If I use street view it seems to point me in a random
direction and usually not toward the address I wanted. I think this is aimed
at that.

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sukuriant
Wow. That's even easier to write a bot to circumvent...

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herge
If Google is using those pictures as captchas, it is probably because they
could not write an algorithm to decipher them.

If, in the worst case, this results in spammers creating even better pattern
recognition algorithms than the current cutting edge, it is certainly worth
all the effort.

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anonymoushn
User responses to the pictures are not checked for correctness. Every time you
see a reCAPTCHA, you can just enter a garbage value for the word that is less
distorted and the system will accept it.

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ceejayoz
It's not always the less distorted one. As for data integrity, presumably
Google shops each word out to multiple users so over time they get an idea of
what the proper response is.

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wtvanhest
exactly, if they do it 100 times, they should get a very pointed distribution
and they should know which distributions are hard for humans to read based on
the way the skewness is and the approximate location of the number in their
GPS database.

They could get a ton right and very, very few wrong with this system.

The real question is, how does their system identify numbers in the photo
without actually knowing what the numbers are?

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ceejayoz
I'd guess that they can detect that it's a house number (look for oval shapes,
or stuff that looks like characters in the usual spot on a house, etc.) but
not be highly confident what the exact number depicted is.

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Permit
I'm curious how they're able to identify what parts of images are house
numbers. To me, that seems like it would be a harder problem than determining
what numbers are present. But I have really little knowledge in this domain so
I might be completely wrong.

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majmun
let me guess , there is another captcha that test users to find house numbers
in a picture.

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ceol
From a privacy standpoint, what effect does this have on us? I kind of cringed
at the thought of my house number being spread around the Internet for
strangers to solve. Then I realized I don't really have a problem with people
solving my address so much as I have a problem with Google having a database
of photographs of everyone's house.

Are my concerns unfounded?

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notatoad
In what way does tying the appearance of your house to its street number have
anything to do with your privacy?

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ceol
It's more so the photograph of my house than knowing my street number.

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enjo
What about that makes you uncomfortable exactly? I'm genuinely curious, as
I've heard that sentiment expressed many times before.

It's not like your house is otherwise invisible...

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ceol
My house isn't necessarily invisible, but having photographs of my (and every
other house) sitting in some company's database makes me uncomfortable.

It's kind of like those cars that drive around recording everyone's license
plate. Sure, that information is sitting out in the open anyway, but
streamlining the collection of that information gives me the creeps.

