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Why Can’t Robots Click The “I’m Not a Robot” Box On Websites?
Clicking a tiny box tells Google all they need to know about your humanity
If you’ve browsed the internet for any amount of time, you will likely come across a reCAPTCHA box. These boxes appear when you first enter certain websites and ask you to check a box to prove that you are not a robot. The box is labeled “I’m not a robot,” and everyone clicks without a second thought because they aren’t robots. Sometimes, clicking the box forces you to do a series of visual puzzles that ask you things like clicking on all of the images with a motorcycle in them or clicking on all of the pictures with streetlights in them. These basic tests lead people to believe that robots cannot do them. But that isn’t the case.
Online robots, or just “bots,” as they are often called, are highly advanced. They have been trained to do everything from playing Runescape to running entire X (formerly Twitter) account farms. So they can clearly click on a box or an image featuring a stop sign. The trick is that these tests aren’t determining whether or not you can click these things but how you click them.
The way that reCAPTCHA boxes determine whether you are human or not is how slow and inefficient you are compared to a machine.
What Is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a company owned by Google that runs all of the little boxes that appear on your screen when you are browsing the internet. The boxes feature a logo with an arrow going in a circle on the right and features the word reCAPTCHA on it. This is an advanced program that Google offers to website hosts that helps keep unwanted traffic off of their sites.
reCAPTCHA replaced the old CAPTCHA system. You might remember the original CAPTCHAs, which were a series of letters and numbers written in squiggly font or obscured by some sort of screen to make them hard to decipher. Unfortunately, the old system was difficult for people with bad eyesight and could be downright frustrating for regular people. Bots eventually learned how to crack the old CAPTCHA system, so Google acquired a company that updated the system to be more varied and robust to combat more advanced online bots.
