For a long time, surfing the web has been accompanied by a “I’m not a robot” feature that tries to verify that you are human. This feature might have come off as a nag to many but it is a necessary evil that is meant to protect automated software from negatively exploiting a website.
A while back, Google acquired reCaptcha, the company behind the feature. The initial reason for the purchase was to assist in scanning books to turn them into digital collections under the Google Books platform.
Over the years, Captcha has found more and not many associated it with the Books application. Today, the feature is mostly known for the verification process. Fortunately, Google has embraced this new usage and has been taking steps to make the whole verification process easier to the masses.
The last iteration saw an upgrade that only asked the user to tick a box next to the word “I’m not a robot”. This update checked the manner in which the box was ticked to determine the natural behavior of a human being. Before this iteration, there were other modes that made you type skewed up letters, and others that made you select certain objects from a collage of pictures. I personally liked the latter, it was like a game with a purpose attached to it. However, the collage mode would quickly get annoying if one was in a hurry and kept picking on the wrong pictures.
Now Google have been listening to these concerns and is now deploying an invisible Captcha feature. The feature uses machine learning to analyze a user’s browsing behavior .It then uses the gathered information to determine if that subject is a robot or not. This is a very intuitive method, it not only makes the process hustle free, but also makes surfing the web a breeze with the entire safety tech running behind the scenes.
