I find it incredible that modern reCAPTCHA exists and is legal.
Aside from the the obviously concerning censorship that happens if you try to access reCAPTCHA-locked sites over Tor, it is literally forcing internet users to do free labour for Google so that can train their AI for whatever project they're doing.
So not only is it a tax on using the internet (paid in seconds to minutes of human existence each time -- I bet reCAPTCHA has collectively cost humanity thousands of lifetimes of wasted effort solving stupid puzzles) and it creates censorship, it also is an act of charity on our part that we provide Google free work with no benefit for ourselves. Given that they literally pay people to do (something similar to) what we are doing for free, I wonder it there are labour law arguments to be made (we aren't paid anything for this work which Google clearly is willing to employ people to do).
You're barking up the wrong tree here. reCAPTCHA is a free service that developers implement. If you don't like that, complain to them. Companies aren't compelled to use Google services - they have no choice because the bot issue is untenable without it.
Yes it's a free service which developers choose to use (though many sites use it without knowing through CloudFlare), but that doesn't change the fact that Google has decided to use it as a method of getting free labour out of internet users.
reCAPTCHA used to be far more reasonable and ethical when it was being used to digitise books. And when you got reCAPTCHA'd constantly as a Tor user, it wasn't so bad. These days I have to spend several minutes of my life giving training data to Google on every site which uses reCAPTCHA, with nothing in return except for the privilege to be able to access the internet.
Aside from the the obviously concerning censorship that happens if you try to access reCAPTCHA-locked sites over Tor, it is literally forcing internet users to do free labour for Google so that can train their AI for whatever project they're doing.
So not only is it a tax on using the internet (paid in seconds to minutes of human existence each time -- I bet reCAPTCHA has collectively cost humanity thousands of lifetimes of wasted effort solving stupid puzzles) and it creates censorship, it also is an act of charity on our part that we provide Google free work with no benefit for ourselves. Given that they literally pay people to do (something similar to) what we are doing for free, I wonder it there are labour law arguments to be made (we aren't paid anything for this work which Google clearly is willing to employ people to do).