That's ridiculous. reCAPTCHA isn't making you do more work, it's just making work you have to do anyway useful. The benefit Google gets from the OCR work is microscopic, and the world gets old books and New York Times articles.
See, I would have much less of a problem with this if Google actually told this
to everyone. Instead, they silently use you for free labor. That's dishonest.
I'm all in for crowdsourcing if you tell me about it and nicely ask me to
participate. Not when I am forced to do it.
From the landing page of reCaptcha: "reCAPTCHA IS A FREE ANTI-BOT SERVICE THAT HELPS DIGITIZE BOOKS".
The "What is reCAPTCHA" explains the OCR process clearly and has the phrase "Currently, we are helping to digitize old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books."
And if you click on the "HELP" link in a reCAPTCHA, it opens a small page with the instructions and a paragraph explain the OCR and a link to Learn More.
Ask twenty regular users who have been forced to fill that crap out.
Nobody reads the about page. Put it on the front page (or the embedded widget, if that is what the user sees) in clear large letters that are easy to see or accept that we consider you scum.
(They do put it on the front page, I already pointed that out)
So, assuming you don't consider HN scum (you're here, after all), can you please explain to me how is this different from YCombinator using HN to publicize their own companies? There's nothing in the front or signup pages explaining that.
Frankly, I don't see why is that a problem. They're offering a free service in exchange for having words manually OCRed. If you have a problem with it I think you should take it to the site that's using reCaptcha, not with Google.
(By the way, I'm not affiliated with Google and I'm not even an heavy user of their services anymore)
By that logic people I think people should also shred newspapers to make sure someone isn't reading them for free after they have finished them and then soak them in water and add a little sand and oil to make them impossible to recycle and unusable as fuel in furnaces. And stop releasing source code, at least under any sane license.
If it doesn't add extra burden to you (assuming there would just be another captcha that didn't end up feeding googles scanning effort), why do you care?
Everyone entering something different is just as valid as entering nothing at all for determining whether a word is identifiable. Even more so actually, since a null response has at least four distinct meanings that I can think of. (user took too long to enter captcha, user couldn't read OCR word, user couldn't read control word, and user didn't feel like entering OCR word)
But it has gotten to the point that about half of the control words are unintelligible by a human.