When shopping on temu, while logged in to an account for which temu has a credit card and physical address and browsing normally, I am presented by an slider CAPTCHA frequently enough that it is irritating.
From a search here, it seems a use of CAPTCHAs is DoS protection, but that is "bad" and also me being logged in seems to preclude that.
Another potential use would be to protect their prices from competitors scraping their site. From a search it seems slider CAPTCHAs were defeated in 2018 (available here) with 96% - 100% success rate, by a group that defeated multiple different types of CAPTCHA and just got a conference paper out of it, and the description of their method takes less than a page. I do not really know, but it does not seem likely that defeating this would be a major challenge for an organisation that could challenge temu considering the advances in AI over those five years.
As I understand it temu is losing loads of money to get customers at the moment in a fairly extreme example of blitzscaling. It seems they would not put such an irritating feature into their web site without a very good reason.
What reason(s) could temu have for putting this CAPTCHA on their site?
