ReCaptcha is terrible. They gaslight you into thinking you got answers wrong just to make you annotate more training data for them. Secondly they are entirely ineffective against spam. Right now I am just using a browser extension that automatically solves them for me and it works almost every time.

Google doesn't care about fighting spam they just want to exploit people for free labor in the name of 'security' just like they are going to kill ad-blocking and fingerprint protection in the name of 'privacy'.

Sometimes, I get some North American food items in recaptcha in India, which I'm quite sure not many have heard in this part of the world; I wonder what decision process went through in selection of food images.

Could you share the extension name?

Any effort you put into solving it can do one of two things: prove you are human, or help label data. It can't do both.

The only way to have it do both is to make you put twice the effort into it. If you are thinking one comes as a byproduct of the other, though, you haven't really thought it through.

Care to expand on that? Why can't you do both?