Class Action Against Google's Crowd Sourcing

When Google recruits your human brain to decode text, it is doing two things: it is providing a service that protects websites from bots, automated spam and abuse, "while letting real people pass through with ease."  Second, it is deciphering text that stumps OCR technology, all the while teaching its own robots, through machine learning, to improve their predictive analysis of human text. (We can have a philosophical discussion about how being "tough on bots" is actually teaching the bots to read like humans... but that's a topic for another day).

Put another way, "Google is 'crowd sourcing' the transcription of words that a computer cannot decipher." In a fascinating decision (GABRIELA ROJAS-LOZANO, v. GOOGLE, INC.),  a California court has dismissed a class action claim that users deserved some compensation for the service they were providing to Google.  To paraphrase, the lawsuit alleged that Google failed to disclose that the second reCAPTCHA word was used for