Tired of Google’s increasingly annoying captcha texts? You know, those rolls of squiggly text that require you to squint your eyes and type out what word or numbers that gets thrown at you. Only to verify that you’re not a bot of course. And to get to whatever site you’d wanted. Well, Google has announced that these captchas will get a makeover. No more trial and error writing. Now we’ll have just one checkbox that will say “I’m not a robot” next to it.
Google has announced that weeding out spam bots has become easier and can tell if you’re man or program only by noticing user interaction or lack thereof. With the introduction of “reCaptcha” Google will examine signs of user activity such as IP adresses and cookies. Plus the movements that you make with your mouse will play a vital role in distinguishing you from a spambot, how you hover the cursor towards the checkbox. Product manager for Google’s captcha team Vinay Shet believes that such a change will make our lives as users a lot easier: For most users, this dramatically simplifies the experience. They basically get a free pass. You can solve the catptcha without having to solve it.”
There are other means of detecting a spambot at play but Google has not been keen to share other information for it may prove a valuable weapon for those who want to bypass these “recaptchpas”. This is not a 100% guarantee that it will make out whether you are human or bot but thankfully( or unfortunately for some) the original captchpa will serve as a failsafe if your click does not give conclusive information. This feature is available only for desktop users at the moment, as smartphone and tablet owners will get a series of images that will require them to diferentiate. Vinay Shet says that captchas can be tracked by Google through the captcha widget and not the whole page. It’s a significantly big step towards a better privacy.