Sometimes just checking the checkbox is enough. Sometimes you need to identify cars and store fronts. I think the better Google knows who you are, the more likely just the checkbox is going to be enough. If you go incognito, you have to train their neural nets, if you give up your privacy, you get in for free.

The clever part from Google's perspective is that you have to trade one of these things to Google in order to get access to sites that do not belong to Google at all. Google convinced site owners to have their users pay a tax to Google.

There are many services out there that can solve Google's recaptcha for fraction's of a penny. When someone puts one up, they can make things more expensive, and perhaps sometimes uneconomical, but in general, the cost is low (~$2.00 for 1,000 recaptchas).

When someone uses a recaptcha, they should think about why they are doing so. It's one thing to use it to save a business model, but it's another to use it to protect information that should be free anyway. The elephant in the room is government data. Many government agencies think that selling their data can be a nice source of side revenue, and a recaptcha is a good way of enforcing it. In reality, they just increase the costs for everyone, and those with means can obtain the information while those without means cannot.

Governments need to release their data, freely, without captchas or fees for single users and bulk users, no exceptions.

I've actually been pleasantly surprised at how much data /is/ available, and how much of it is available through common formats like Socrata Open Data API (for use with tools like https://github.com/xmunoz/sodapy)

The counter argument is that they do a great job with trivial stuff like registered dog's names, and less well with sensitive/important issues like policing.

What's the right way to leverage the platform developed for the first into the second?

> Governments need to release their data, freely

Totally agree. Fortunately the Dutch government is trying to make as much data open as they reasonably can, and regularly organise events to encourage developers to use their open APIs.