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Google finally bids farewell to manual captchas
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Captchas are used by websites to verify whether or not a user is human. But as of late, machines have been getting better at reading them than people are. (Shutterstock/File)
T
o the joy of internet users everywhere, Google has announced that because of evolving spambots and technology, they will never have to input another captcha again.
The captcha system, which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” is used by websites to verify whether a user is human. But, as of late, machines have been getting better at reading them than people are.
The last big update was in 2013, when Google implemented the “I’m not a robot” checkbox, which worked by analyzing the click style of a user. If something seemed off and the captcha thought there was a chance of the user being a bot, another test would come up.
But now, with Google’s Invisible reCAPTCHA, the program will be able to see that a user is human by analyzing their browsing habits.
Read also: Google Hangouts now competes with Slack, Skype
In a video, the tech giant explained that “powering these advances is a combination of machine learning and advanced risk analysis that adapt to new and emerging threats.”
As captchas were also previously used by Google as a crowdsourced transcription system to specify words and numbers that were illegible to Google’s own automated system, some people are wondering what the company's incentive for the change might be.
Former Google employee Shuman Ghosemajumder told Popular Science that “Google in general — and this is certainly a philosophy that we adhered to when I was there — believed that anything that is good for the internet, is good for Google.” (sul/kes)
