In the last year, Google has started to roll out reCAPTCHA Version 3. And, unfortunately, there’s not much that can be said for this, because it’s such a closely guarded secret. All that we do know is, from the minute you enter a website with reCAPTCHA Version 3 on it, you will be monitored in the background, and when you go to click ‘submit’ you’ll have already been assigned a ‘How Likely This is to be a Robot’ score.

There are no documents detailing how they work this out, and we can only hope that they are taking into account Incognito Mode, and importantly, accessibility tools. For all we know, those with a negative score may have their comment immediately archived or their form submission sent into a spam folder. And there’s no way to tell if you’ve failed.

Facial recognition

Something that Monzo Bank are doing, is a sure-fire way of ensuring you’re not a robot. Their identification checks involve you sending a picture of your ID, and thereafter sending a video of you saying a phrase. Not only is this checking you are a human, it’s ensuring you’re the specific human in question.

Usually what happens instead is that you get an unsolvable challenge. Well, not always unsolvable, occasionally the algorithm has mercy and lets you through after minutes of suffering. But it's not really worth trying.

I've been stuck in reCAPTCHA hell before where I swear they were sent to specifically discourage someone from continuing.

"Select All the Crosswalks" but then, they have an image of the rumblestrips cut into the side of highways (that warn you when you veer off road) when, photographed correctly "look like" crosswalk stripes. Didn't select it because it's not a crosswalk, failed. Then everything else is "Select the bicycles" with images of motorcycles too. Does Google know the difference between the two? I do. Still failed, maybe I should have selected the motorcycles also.

And don't even get me started on the ones where you have like 4 pixels of an image in another square. Do you select it as well? Part of the fire hydrant is in that square. When selecting the street lights, do you choose JUST the very clearly obvious ones, or do you select the small, out of focus ones in another square as well?

Usually at this point I just say, "fuck it" and find what I'm looking for elsewhere.

What this article describes but fails to comment on is that "CAPTCHA" is a word that started off meaning "a test for humans versus bots" and ended up meaning "Google AND ONLY GOOGLE Rummaging Through Everything You Do On The Web To See If They Like It".

Nowadays, CAPTCHA can only serve as a means for the user to screen out fake forums like 4chan that look like they're independent companies when they're really just Google spy franchises. After you rule out everything bogus ... maybe you come here.