CAPTCHAs Need to Go, Here’s Why

CAPTCHAs have been an indispensable part of the internet for so long that it’s hard to think of them as something dispensable. In spite of the fact that this is the case, they might’ve ended up becoming obsolete in the modern age. Nowadays, there are bots that can easily bypass CAPTCHAs. That ends up making them far less useful than might have been the case otherwise, which begs the question: why are they still being used?

According to Elizabeth Lopatto at the Verge, there’s a lot to suggest that they need to become a thing of the past, pointing out numerous problems associated with them.

It is important to note that some CAPTCHAs can be downright frustrating. For example, the Google reCAPTCHA requires you to identify images over and over again. This can be a big headache because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up delaying simple tasks far more than necessary.

Image: DIW

What's more is that these CAPTCHAs can sometimes be impossible to solve. Some of them request you to select images containing bicycles, but the entire thing consists of a single image broken up into several pieces. Does a piece containing the bicycle’s handle count? Technically speaking, none of the pieces actually depict a bicycle in its entirety, yet users are forced to figure it out time and time again.

As if that weren't already enough, some CAPTCHAs feature blurry images that don’t look like much of anything at all. If you factor in people that have issues with focused vision, these problems will become several orders of magnitude worse than they are already.

In this modern day and age, CAPTCHAs seem more like a roadblock than a form of innovation. reCAPTCHAS in particular seem to create more problems than they solve. In the end, there has to be a way to make sure that bots aren’t able to overwhelm the internet, and the tech industry needs to figure it out.

It will be interesting to see if anyone is able to come up with a solution that won’t waste as much time as reCAPTCHAs, since they might make surfing the web a whole lot easier than it is right now.

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World