reCAPTCHA Easy for People. Hard for Bots. Privacy Concerns?

NAOSSOFT is happy to announce that we have tested and implemented google reCAPTCHA V3 on our website. Since implementation, we have been able to identify bots and suspicious requests without annoying our users by asking them to prove that they are humans. This technology is hard on online bots and suspicious individuals.

In the previous versions, users were required to manually click a checkbox or be stuck clicking boxes of storefronts, traffic lights, cars, bridges in an attempt to convince the system they are actually not robots. You know you have failed a captcha or two, not matching the street lights or reading the strings correctly.

Check here if you are not a robot. If you are not a robot, can you read this nonsensical string of letters and numbers that look like they’ve been partly erased with an eraser? Can you choose the picture of a car out of these nine different street scenes?

Now, when you enter a form on a website that’s using reCaptcha V3, you won’t see the “I’m not a robot” checkbox, nor will you have to prove you know what a cat looks like. In fact, you won’t see anything at all.

Privacy Concerns?

We are concerned about consumer privacy because it means that Google is receiving data from the users and every site like ours that contains reCAPTCHA technology. Google uses its cookies to identify users. reCAPTCHA knows if you have a google account, you must be or more likely to be a human. Therefore it doesn’t identify you as a threat or suspicious bot through its scoring system. This means Google can potentially track the user’s clicking habits and their whereabouts. Google claims that it will not use the information for its own benefits such as target advertising to those specific users. There is always a trade off when it comes to security.  Here at NAOSSOFT, we want to be trasparent. We are updating our privacy policy to include information about this new technology and how it will affect our users. We hope in the future Google will use artificial intelligence to improve reCAPTCHA, we do have a few ideas.

What is reCAPTCHA?

reCAPTCHA is a free service by Google that protects your website from spam and abuse. reCAPTCHA uses an advanced risk analysis engine and adaptive challenges to keep automated software from engaging in abusive activities on your site. It does this while letting your valid users pass through with ease. Without reCAPTCHA, bot could automatically fill out forms on your website with spams by the seconds.

What is reCAPTCHA v3?

reCAPTCHA v3 allows you to verify if an interaction is legitimate without any user interaction. It is a pure JavaScript API returning a score, giving you the ability to take action in the context of your site: for instance requiring additional factors of authentication, sending a post to moderation, or throttling bots that may be scraping content.

Please contact NAOSSOFT if you’d like to implement reCAPTCHA V3 on your website.  Current NAOSSOFT customers will incur no additional charges, we will do it for Free. We will also update your privacy policy to let your site users know about the new technology how it works, and how it affects their privacy.

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