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Meeting the Risks of Generativity: Privacy 2.0 207
that over nine billion person-hours were spent playing Windows Solitaire in a
single year, devised the online “ESP” game, in which two remote players are
randomly paired and shown an image. They are asked to guess the word that
best describes the image, and when they each guess the same word they win
points. 28 Their actions also provide input to a database that reliably labels images
for use in graphical search engines—improving the ability of image search
engines to identify images. In real time, then, people are building and participating
in a collective, organic, worldwide computer to perform tasks that real
computers cannot easily do themselves. 29
These kinds of grid applications produce (or at least encourage) certain
kinds of public activity by combining small, individual private actions. Benkler
calls this phenomenon “coordinate coexistence producing information.” 30
Benkler points out that the same idea helps us find what we are looking for on
the Internet, even if we do not go out of our way to play the ESP game; search
engines commonly aggregate the artifacts of individual Internet activity, such
as webmasters’ choices about where to link, to produce relevant search results.
Search engines also track which links are most often clicked on in ordered
search results in order, and then more prominently feature those links in future
searches. 31 The value of this human-derived wisdom has been noted by spammers,
who create “link farms” of fake Web sites containing fragments of text
drawn at random from elsewhere on the Web (“word salad”) that link back to
the spammers’ sites in an attempt to boost their search engine rankings. The
most useful links are ones placed on genuinely popular Web sites, though, and
the piles of word salad do not qualify.
As a result, spammers have turned to leaving comments on popular blogs
that ignore the original entry to which they are attached and instead simply
provide links back to their own Web sites. In response, the authors of blogging
software have incorporated so-called captcha boxes that must be navigated before
anyone can leave a comment on a blog. Captchas—now used on many
mainstream Web sites including Ticketmaster.com—ask users to prove that
they are human by typing in, say, a distorted nonsense word displayed in a
small graphic. 32 Computers can start with a word and make a distorted image
in a heartbeat, but they cannot easily reverse engineer the distorted image back
to the word. This need for human intervention was intended to force spammers
to abandon automated robots to place their blog comment spam. For a
while they did, reportedly setting up captcha sweatshops that paid people to
solve captchas from blog comment prompts all day long. 33 (In 2003, the going
rate was $2.50/hour for such work.) 34 But spammers have continued to ex-