There is no evil like reCAPTCHA
Google did not create reCAPTCHA. They bought it; it was started by Luis von Ahn, who went on to create Duolingo.When reCAPTCHA was created, the alternative was CAPTCHA, which tried to impede bots but did not generate any social benefit. This was the genius of the original reCAPTCHA concept: the time taken to 'confirm humanity' could be channeled into the socially-useful endeavor of digitizing books.  Capture some of the heat emissions of impeding bots for a useful purpose, rather than letting it all go to waste.Now, yes, Google is using it to train their self-driving car AI, and there's a bunch else happening in it to connect to Google's surveillance apparatus. There's much to legitimately criticize there.  I personally don't view training Google's proprietary AI as the same kind of intrinsically altruistic purpose as digitizing the world's pre-digital books.But putting the entire concept on blast with erroneous history that can be corrected with about 60 seconds on Wikipedia doesn't help the argument at all.