Google develops ‘Invisible Recaptcha’

Google is working on a captcha that does not require any form of interaction and is even completely invisible to a visitor. The company is not yet revealing how it works, but webmasters can already sign up to get started with the technology.

The technology will be available soon, Google writes on its captcha webpage. The fact that Invisible Recaptcha will be released soon suggests that the technology will work wherever the standard No Captcha Recaptcha is currently used. This usually involves a single mouse click in the ‘I’m not a robot’ box.

The Captcha, or completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart, is a verification system that should prevent automated bots from visiting websites and, for example, imitating real users or carrying out a DDO attack. The first of these tests consisted of simple bits of text that users had to type, but as bots got better at text recognition, these commands had to become more difficult, much to the frustration of the regular user. In response, Google released the No Captcha Recaptcha in 2014, which works with what Google describes as an advanced risk analysis engine and only requires a mouse click.

Although the intent of a Captcha is benign, in practice it sometimes also temporarily thwarts innocent users. Users of anonymization services such as Tor and VPNs complain that many websites not only force them to fulfill a No Captcha Recaptcha, but also have to pass a visual test, such as ‘click all pictures with a store facade’. It is not clear at this time whether this new Captcha also means the end of these problems for these specific users.