Google has rolled out a new version of its reCAPTCHA. With this tool, website owners should be assured that their visitors are people and not bots. The new version ensures that less human interaction is needed, according to Google.
According to the internet giant, the tool was far from perfect, and one-time verification is not good enough for every use case. Until now, visitors had to solve interactive tests, such as recognizing pictures with a motorbike. The new version generates a score that is used to determine whether someone is a human being or a robot that mainly places spam.
With the third version of reCAPTCHA, users no longer have to fill in text, tick boxes or solve puzzles. This is only necessary if Google’s algorithms conclude that strange behavior is displayed by the user. “In short, reCAPTCHA v3 helps you to protect your websites, without user friction, and gives you more power to decide what to do in risky situations,” says Wei Liu, product manager at Google.
Actions
The new version of the tool further introduces “Actions”, which are tags that can be used to trigger the next verification step and perform risk analyses in context. Older versions were designed to run isolated on a single page. The new version uses signals from user interactions on various pages. Then the user gets a score between 0 and 1, which is the basis for deciding whether someone is human or not.
The score can be used in various ways, says Liu. For example, developers can set a threshold to determine when users need to do additional verification checks, or use it to train anti-spam machine learning models. Furthermore, the score can be combined with data such as a user’s profile or his transaction history, should developers need a more complex system to block bots.
“By providing you with these new ways to adapt the actions that occur for different types of traffic, this new version allows you to protect your website from bots and improve your user experience based on the specific requirements of your website,” says Liu. “As always, we work every day to stay one step ahead of attackers and make the Internet safe and easy to use, except for bots.”
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