Screenshots and metadata for 214 reCAPTCHA challenges encountered between September 2022 - September 2023

In Chapter 3 of my dissertation (tentatively titled \" Becoming Users:Layers of People, Technology, and Power on the Internet. \"), I describe how online user activities are datafied and monetized in subtle and often obfuscated ways. The chapter focuses on Google’s reCAPTCHA, a popular implementation of a CAPTCHA challenge. A CAPTCHA, or “Completely Automated Turning test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is a simple task or challenge which is intended to differentiate between genuine human users and those who may be using software or other automated means to interact maliciously with a website, such as for spam, mass data scraping, or denial of service attacks. reCAPTCHA challenges are increasingly being hidden from direct view of the user, and instead assessing our mouse movements, browsing patterns, and other data to evaluate the likelihood that we are “authentic” users. These hidden challenges raise the stakes of understanding our own construction as Users because they obfuscate pra..., I developed a custom Google Chrome extension which detects when a page contains a reCAPTCHA and prompts the user to save a screenshot or screen recording while also collecting basic metadata. During Summer 2022, I began work on this website to collate and present the screen captures that I save throughout the year. The purpose of collecting these examples of websites where reCAPTCHAs appear is to understand how this Web element is situated within websites and presented to users, along with sketching out the frequency of their use and on what kinds of websites. Given that I will only be collecting records of my own interactions with reCAPTCHAs, this will not be a comprehensive sample that I can generalize as representative of all Web users. Though my experiences of the reCAPTCHA will differ from those of any other person, this collection will nevertheless be useful for demonstrating how the interface element may be embedded within websites and presented to users. Following Niels Brügger’..., , # reCAPTCHAs

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h70rxwdsr](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h70rxwdsr)

## Description of the data and file structure

Metadata about the reCAPTCHAs is all stored in a single JSON file in the \"JSON Lines\" format. This means that every line of the file contains a single record. For example:

```
{\"_id\":\"b4f256f6-7503-42d9-9a18-b60c2331a7c6\",\"status\":3,\"timestamp\":{\"$date\":\"2022-08-20T13:54:33.574Z\"},\"original_filename\":\"Screen Shot 2022-08-20 at 8.53.53 AM.png\",\"new_filename\":\"b4f256f6-7503-42d9-9a18-b60c2331a7c6.png\",\"privacy\":true,\"website_name\":\"Esurance\",\"website_url\":\"esurance.com\",\"website_type\":\"financial\",\"website_type_other\":\"\",\"visible\":true,\"challenge_description\":\"\\"Protected by reCAPTCHA\\" logo in the bottom corner\",\"challenge_time\":0,\"challenge_attempts\":0,\"additional_description\":\"\",\"accept_terms\":true,\"_keywords\":[\"bottom\",\"by\",\"com\",\"corner\",\"esurance\",\"financial\",\"in\",\"logo\",\"protected\",\"recaptcha\",\"the\"],\"updated_at\":{\"$date\":\"2022-08-22T02:03...