Talk:ReCAPTCHA

Google Streetview
Since last week Google is showing color pictures containing street numbers to solve. It's very possible they are fed from Google Streetview to more accurately locate houses. 87.153.135.6 (talk) 01:14, 28 March 2012 (UTC)


 * On the Wikimedia Commons there is an example picture of such a CAPTCHA: Can someone incorporate it in the article plz? thx --84.159.190.96 (talk) 05:38, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

it's everywhere, whoever invented it stinks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.90.182.62 (talk) 00:28, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

System is unusable by deafblind people
As well as restoring a general criticism section, this article should have a section on how poor it is for many disabled people. The audio alternative is inaccessible to deafblind people. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/05/disability_groups_want_captchas_rendered_extinct/

This page reads like an advert or an in-house history of the system written by its owners. A lot of work is need to make it more balanced and it is very concerning that attempts to add that balance have been deleted by people who should have spent time to add in some (readily available) references instead. Not cool. Zctyp18 (talk) 23:29, 5 January 2014 (UTC)


 * If 1% of the effort involved in blaming ID schemes (like catcha, et al) and engineering ways to defeat them were instead aimed at killing off SPAMmers, there would be no need for them [the ID schemes, etc.]. Frankly, if Yahoo! and Google just blocked ALL email coming from all country-related domains (eg, .EU, .CH, etc.), 99% of the SPAM I find in my Inbox would go away instantly. And if you are from one of those domains and you're now offended, DO NOT whine at me, do something about your friends and countrymen sending SPAM!! Be part of the solution, not the problem. No one will complain (other than the SPAMmers and their cohorts) I assure you. JimScott (talk) 21:53, 11 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Most of the spam I get is from .com domains. Should .com be blocked? What about systems like Wikipedia that don't require registration? Tying reCAPTCHA frustration back to the article, can someone find a reliable source explicitly comparing reCAPTCHA to other anti-spam systems? For example, Wikipedia seems to be doing pretty well with its system of "most IP addresses can edit most articles, but some IPs are blocked and some articles are semi-protected". MarkGyver (talk) 06:21, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * What about the CAPTCHA article? It seems that the opposite of this article is happening in the CAPTCHA article, the fact that the article is written as an essay, but it focuses mainly on the negative aspects of CAPTCHA, particularly how inaccessible and circumventable it is. Maybe people could remove negative parts from the CAPTCHA article, but leave this article alone, since there is a sufficient amount of criticism, and it is not undue weight?
 * Sincerely, Thenewright22 (talk) 04:37, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Now there are suddenly not two words, but only one!
Yesterday I realized that sometimes ReCAPTCHA only shows one word. Example screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/BwHppTX.jpg. Now, how does that work? How can the user both digitize AND verify that he is human with only one picture?

192.38.5.154 (talk) 06:33, 11 August 2014 (UTC)


 * By challenging another user and matching these. 188.56.197.163 (talk) 10:58, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Wrong example
The image on the right with this caption: "An example of a reCAPTCHA challenge from 2007"

That is NOT a recaptcha, that's a plain captcha.

Teo8976 (talk) 12:05, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure it's still meaningful to talk of "a reCAPTCHA" any more - taking the article as a whole, it seems to have become more of a brand name than a noun used to describe double-distorted-word captchas. The image in question does seem to be exactly what reCAPTCHAs looked like in 2007, though; I'll attach that TechCrunch article as a source. --McGeddon (talk) 13:21, 27 February 2015 (UTC)


 * @ User:McGeddon I see your point That's a two-word captcha, yet it's (mis)branded as reCaptcha. I didn't remember ever seeing such thing, but judging from what Google Image returns for "recaptcha" I guess it was pretty common that websites misused the reCaptcha brand with what is really just a two-word captcha. I wouldn't consider a picture from a techCrunch article as a reliable source, btw. People often embellish their articles with some random googled picture. Anyway, if this is the case (i.e. two-word captchas wrongly branded as recaptchas have been widely used), then it would be worth mentioning in the article. This is what "true" (but old) recaptchas looked like:
 * http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xwewXT6Nwog/UmrAaB9q0bI/AAAAAAAANfk/KFAI72k3gFw/s1600/recaptcha.png
 * http://docs.whmcs.com/images/thumb/5/5a/Red.jpg/300px-Red.jpg
 * If people confuse things and use a thing under a brand that is supposed to represent another thing, Wikipedia should be the place to clarify it, not to reinforce the confusion

Teo8976 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 13:43, 27 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Btw, "it seems to have become more of a brand name than a noun used to describe double-distorted-word captchas." It was never supposed to describe "double-distorted-word captchas", that would be actually the misuse of the term we are talking about. And as far as I understand it has always been a brand name. Did you perhaps mean the other way around? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Teo8976 (talk • contribs) 13:47, 27 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Ah, my mistake. I meant it that way around because I thought you were saying the opposite. All good, then.
 * I've dug out a Forbes source to confirm that the 2010 image is representative of 2010 reCAPTCHAs. Both Forbes and TechCrunch are reliable sources, but if you've a serious reason to doubt their screenshots we can dig deeper. --McGeddon (talk) 14:52, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Lol The wrong image is still there. Or again. Look, it's really simple: a Recaptcha has two images, one generated purposefully distorted and the other a real picture. The generated one is the one that is used to check whether the responder is human, because it's the one to which the answer is known; the other one is used to gather data from the user. The user supposedly doesn't know which is which and therefore supposedly gives the correct answer to both. The one in the example is obviously two generated words. Wherever it came from it's obviously wrong, if it was a "reliable" source, it was not reliable for this. Teo8976 (talk) 00:06, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Missing entry in chapter "Security"
As already stated in other posts here, this article is one of the badest I've read... it is like advertising this CAPTCHA system. And it seems critism is either removed or not allowed, especially as examples of breaking CAPTCHAs are missing, like this one: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/10/captcha-busted-ai-company-claims-have-broken-internets-favorite-protection-system I am pretty sure, if this linked article (resp the robust algorithm behind, which is not yet published, I think) would get more attention, those annoying CAPTCHAs would vanish from the web, as they not only distracting, they are also fake security.

As if it is a joke, to enter this text I need to solve a CAPTCHA... as I said: ANNOYING! 217.109.123.82 (talk) 07:45, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

'Criticism' section is really understated
Surely, this section could further expound on the sheer difficulty of getting the reCAPTCHA system to work with browser that don't allow Google to have completely unmitigated access to scripts and cookies, which means Google will insist that the 'suspicious' user must solve an excess of 20+ reCAPTCHA challenges all in one go. At this point, Google has so severely cracked down on browser security features that I can't actually pass any reCAPTCHA challenge at all. About the only work-around would be to switch over to a very insecure Internet Explorer and allow Google (and the Web site imposing the reCAPTCHA) to do whatever it wants to my computer. The difficulty of dealing with reCAPTCHA has become such a severe hindrance that I no longer bother trying to access sites that require regular interaction with this system. I can only pray that Wikipedia never adopts reCAPTCHA as well. 75.63.209.97 (talk) 21:47, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Feel free to add any criticism that is supported by reliable sources. JezGrove (talk) 22:05, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

What do you mean by "reliable sources"? The fact is that ReCAPTCHA does not work --- PERIOD. ---Dagme (talk) 23:53, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

There is also no mention that it doesn't work without Javascript and that Google "behavioral analysis" is biased toward Chrome users and those who doesnt' block Google spying stuff like Google analytics through plugins or other means. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.116.143.11 (talk) 15:34, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

It's also not mentioned that it is very US-biased; many of the images presented for recognition require familiarity with US-style street furniture (such as fire hydrants) and terminology (such as "crosswalk"). Mhkay (talk) 15:27, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Another example: unless you know that all US taxis are yellow, find the taxi becomes impossible, even peering at short distance on a large screen. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 15:09, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Free reCAPTCHA animation
The video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbvxFW4UJdU&t=10, published by Google who owns the copyright to reCAPTCHA, is licensed under CC-BY 3.0 and has an animation for reCAPTCHA which is almost identical to the fair use image here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NoCAPTCHA_reCAPTCHA.gif. This one should be used over the fair use image, but I'm not an expert in video editing so I am unable to crop out the animation portion and convert it into a gif. 11icewing (talk) 23:29, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

December 2020: Reworded a paragraph in a way that may be inaccurate to the source it uses
Today, I made an edit to this article to correct some mistakes, reword some sentences and move others. I reworded the following paragraph:

"Some people were concerned when Google announced reCAPTCHA v3.0 about their privacy because of the vulnerability that people viewing the sites with reCAPTCHA v2.0 faced with the possibility of Google tracking them throughout the website as they now would have full control."

To:

"Concerns were raised regarding privacy when Google announced reCAPTCHA v3.0, as it allows Google to track users on non-Google websites."

I do not know what the original was attempting to say, so this may be incorrect. Can someone check the citation in question and reword what I have written as required? Thank you. DesertPipeline (talk) 13:04, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

Missing citation
Article currently says in the introduction for V2 "if the analysis of cookies and canvas rendering suggested the page was being downloaded automatically." however the linked citation does not mention canvas rendering or cookies (at least, from what I can see). TNTgamer71 (talk) 20:51, 19 August 2023 (UTC)


 * @TNTgamer71202.162.236.206 201.162.236.206 (talk) 05:12, 2 May 2024 (UTC)