Ethical and legal considerations of reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a technology that aims to stop computers from abusing automated services (e.g., stop spamming) while harnessing a large amount of brainpower to complete tasks amenable to being broken into small quanta. The technology, currently owned by Google, is being used to make old documents searchable with digital text through the process of optical character recognition (OCR). It has proven to be accurate and effective. In this paper, the ethics and legality of reCAPTCHA as it is currently used is discussed. Solutions for improving reCAPTCHA in these two contexts are proposed.