I came across an interesting article on ZDNet entitled “Inside India’s CAPTCHA solving economy” which discusses how Indian “data processing” companies are being used to solve CAPTCHAs, presumably to circumnavigate security measures put in place by companies to prevent spammers from registering bogus accounts for the purposes of spamming and other unsavoury activities.

Firstly, for those unfamiliar with what a CAPTCHA is and the purpose of it, here’s a definition from the official CAPTCHA site:

A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t:

By using real people to solve CAPTCHAs – at a very low price – spammers are able to overcome the useful function of the CAPTCHA in an economically viable fashion.

Mobenzi could be used to solve CAPTCHAs as the Mobenzi task would simply need to prompt the agent to review the image (the CAPTCHA) and respond with the actual text (thereby solving the CAPTCHA).

The example of CAPTHA solving opens the broader question: What level of monitoring and/or censorship (if any) should be imposed on those submitting tasks for processing by the Mobenzi platform?

Naturally, when Mobenzi is commercially released we will stipulate terms of use which will outline the sorts of activities which are prohibited. But is this enough? This particular example introduces some interesting issues worthy of consideration. Spamming is obviously prohibited by legislation in most countries and solving a large number of CAPTCHAs using a human labour force is rather likely to be used for this purpose, but is the process of using real people to solve CAPTCHAs automatically illegal?

Following this line of thinking, what other potentially malicious activities could be supported by the Mobenzi service and how should we guard against this? It may be infeasible, and possibly unethical to screen tasks submitted by commercial users.

One possible solution may be to use the CAPTCHA solving ability of the Mobenzi platform to prevent spammers from doing so. A small number of CAPTCHAs from major sites typically attacked by spammers could be processed by us and compared with the images requested to be processed by Mobenzi users. If a statistical match is discovered, the offending user could be sanctioned immediately.

It’s early days yet – but these types of concerns will be important should the Mobenzi service prove successful to ensure that it is used for legitimate purposes only.

Workin wit mobenzi ws great n hp w’l start soon. Al d best:-)

This is a great example of Textese (‘SMS language’ involving abbreviations and slang). This comment translates to regular English as ‘Working with Mobenzi was great and I hope We’ll start soon. All the best. (said with a smile)’
[61 vs 93 characters = 34% compression].

Mobenzi is a good program/organisation which will bring many job opportunities to people, its interesting and entertaining and at the same time its challenging you to think before answering each question. Last but not least it will improve English language for many people who work with mobenzi because most of time it all about English

This was a very positive comment from one of the participants. Internally, we had discussed the potential impact Mobenzi work could have on education (such as English comprehension), but we certainly never expected participants to pick that up as a benefit during a short pilot project (it’s becoming very clear that we should stop underestimating participants).

Establish marketing strategies for mobenzi to ensure availability of tasks and more employment.

This participant seemed eager to see us succeed and offered some business advice.

I would like to work for Mobenzi.!!!

No comments, it will be a previlage working at mobenzi.

It was fun ,challenging and informative about the world that we live in.

No comment everything is new and perfect I enjoy mobenzi.

Mobenzi is very interesting and it challenges my knowledge in English and makes you think. But mostly it’s going to give us some sort of employment. THUMBS UP MOBENZI!!

This final comment sums up the sentiment of the team. I don’t think we could have expected a more positive reception to the project from the participants themselves.