People are terrified after realizing what clicking ‘I am not a robot’ actually does: "It checks my..."
The world of technology gets stranger by the day, and for good reason, experts say. Anyone surfing the internet is likely to stumble on a page asking them to confirm if they are a robot or not. The infamous “I am not a robot” checkbox that appears before a CAPTCHA code pops up has plagued countless websites and pages. However, this is an intentional effort made by software programmers to determine whether the internet user is a human being or a robot to ensure the safety of internet browsing. But the real question lies beyond the mere checkbox and in the off-screen mechanism used to differentiate a human being from robotic behavior, per Reader’s Digest.
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Whew! Samuel Bucholtz, co-founder of Casaba Security, a cybersecurity firm, demystified the complex process of identifying web interactions through these mystery codes. He said, “A CAPTCHA fundamentally is any mechanism by which a computer—more pedantically, software written by a programmer—can identify if it is interacting with a human being rather than another computer.” While a simple tick on the box does the work oftentimes, there are more complex puzzles coming your way if the site has the slightest doubt about your authenticity.
Every internet user secures their account with a set username and password. But with booming technology, this is not enough. As of now, a CAPTCHA code is mandatory accompanied by a password to prevent a bot user, which is basically an automated software application designed to perform repetitive tasks online and follow instructions mimicking human behavior, per Amazon Web Services. Bots are infamous for malicious activities on the internet like spamming and account hijacking. Bucholtz further cautioned that bots can rapidly try out password combinations from A to ZZZZZZ. Hence, sites are protected with simple CAPTCHA codes meant to baffle the bot computers wired to solve complex tasks.
The secret of the CAPTCHA code lies in your website history, location, and other human things. John Lloyd, chief technology officer of Casaba Security, has a simple logic– bots fail at solving “trivial” problems for humans. Therefore, when a user attempts to take a CAPTCHA test, the application programming interface (API) or third-party sites check out the user’s cookies, location, and cached browser data to assess a score that is sent back to the website. Additionally, the cursor’s movement towards the CAPTCHA box is also evaluated to check for unpredictability factors that allow the test to decide whether the user is legitimate, per Cloudflare. According to the experts, such unpredictable behavior patterns cannot be recreated by bots no matter the complexity of their software.
Sandi Toksvig, show host at BBC’s British TV panel show QI explained it better. “So let us say, for example, before you tick the box you watched a couple of cat videos and you liked a tweet about Greta Thunberg, you checked your Gmail account before you got down to work - all of that makes them think that you must be a human,” the comedian said in the clip. The checkmark on the ‘I am not a robot’ box is an instruction for the site to, in turn, check the user’s data and review the interaction. "Sh*t! This is terrifying!" said one netizen (@gauravvikalp) in the comments while another (@padstowphantom) warily noted, “It checks my browser history?! Oh dear…” The concern about users’ web history being surveyed by a machine appeared to be a common sentiment among people.