What really happens when you click ‘I’m not a robot’ (2024)

FAQs

What really happens when you click ‘I’m not a robot’? ›

The “I'm not a robot” checkbox is a CAPTCHA, or a “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Essentially any type of test, whether it's selecting the image with stoplights or typing out a word that's blurry, is a CAPTCHA, which is used to stop bots.

A 2020 episode of QI gave a rather surprising explanation of what ticking 'I am not a robot' on a website really does. They said that it gives a website permission to look at your actions and history on your device to decide if you are human.

A CAPTCHA test is made up of two simple parts: a randomly generated sequence of letters and/or numbers that appear as a distorted image, and a text box. To pass a the test and prove your human identity, simply type the characters you see in the image into the text box.

"Essentially, when you are clicking 'I am not a robot' box, you are instructing the site to have a look at your data and decide for itself. If the machine is not sure, that's when it directs you to click on lightroom pictures of fire hydrants that aren't there."

Google interprets that your IP address / device sends multiple search requests at the same time (this creates a suspicious effect on the search engine). With CAPTCHA, Google makes sure that you are not a robot or a computer program that sends multiple requests for search or spam.

CAPTCHA does not directly check the user's web history. However, some CAPTCHA implementations may use browser fingerprints or other data available to the website to determine the user's identity and assess their risk level.

It's not actually the act of clicking “I'm not a robot” that confirms you're not a bot. It's what happens before you click it. “When you click on that checkbox, the site sends back a bunch of information to Google,” John Lloyd, chief technology officer of Casaba Security, told Reader's Digest.

You could try using proxies or a headless browser like Puppeteer, but if you want to really fullproof your script against CAPTCHAs, might be worth going with a scraping tool with fingerprint emulation and block bypassing technology.

Using neural networks trained on massive datasets, AI can now reliably solve CAPTCHAs designed to leverage distortions or clutter to stump bots. Whereas older machine learning approaches struggled with obscured or stylized text, modern AI has achieved human-comparable accuracy on many CAPTCHA datasets.

The latest versions of reCAPTCHA are able to take a holistic look at a user's behavior and history of interacting with content on the Internet. Most of the time, the program can decide based on those factors whether or not the user is a bot, without providing the user with a challenge to complete.

How effective is I am not a robot? ›

By comparing the speed and accuracy of 1,400 participants versus AI bots in solving 14,000 CAPTCHAs, the researchers found that bots were far better than humans at beating these tests. The bots were 99.8 accurate while humans ranged from 50% to 84% accuracy.

Turns out the answer is part of a bigger story about being human. The box test isn't really about the box! It's actually tracking other things about your behavior, like how you move your mouse as you go to check the box.

Google has explained it by saying that CAPTCHA can be triggered by an automated process sometimes caused by spambots, infected computers, email worms, or SEO tools. You simply need to verify it by entering the characters or clicking the correct image, and you are done.

Do CAPTCHAs actually work? Yes and no. While CAPTCHAs alone can help stop very simple bots, they no longer perform their original objective: stopping all bots without creating a negative user experience for humans.

It protects your favourite websites from spam and abuse so that you don't have to compete with robots and abusive scripts to access sites. The main goal of CAPTCHA is to provide a test which is simple and straight forward for any human to answer but which is almost impossible for a computer to solve.

The Birth of reCaptcha

One of the primary reasons bots struggle with the 'I Am Not a Robot' test lies in flawed human behavior. When a user checks the box, the system detects the action and the cursor's path. Humans tend to move the mouse more erratically and randomly in their inherent unpredictability.

iCloud allows you to bypass many challenges by automatically and privately verifying your iPhone and account. You can turn this bypass on or off. Go to Settings > [your name] > Sign-In & Security, then turn Automatic Verification on or off.