reCAPTCHA

But in the meantime, it's always a difficult path to go down.

And when you look at anti-bot, the approaches, there's obviously the simplest, which is like reCAPTCHA.

There is sort of like solving these little puzzles.

But over the next, you can start to see it happening already.

There starts to be more identification signals around like for this particular user, like where are they coming from? What is their patterns of behavior? What is the fingerprinting of their browser? And there's been a lot of research out there.

And it's something that like is an evolving, I think an evolving conversation between like the websites that we work with and sort of how we sort of work around the existing controls.

One thing to note, reCAPTCHA is not the simplest.

reCAPTCHA is actually the hardest CAPTCHA.

So you've seen new versions of it.

The next step was Google's reCAPTCHA, where they would take Google Street View pictures where you're actually helping train their AI in the background by pointing out what little blocks have a traffic light in it, which ones have a stop sign, which ones have a motorcycle.

And you're both solving a captcha while helping train their AI.

But even that, automation has gotten better at solving them.

School leaders should therefore examine what suppliers mean by engagement.

Are students spending more time in the platform because they're thinking or because they're navigating confusing responses? Does the product test delayed retention? Can teachers control whether it answers prompts or questions? What student data does it collect? The article's webpage includes notices about reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy.

But a privacy link on a public website isn't a data governance model for schools.

Procurement needs clearer answers about data storage, access, deletion, and accountability.

They're not using like some third party form service.

I feel good about them turning off opt-in confirmation emails because again, we have that really robust automatic bot protection and it's going to show a reCAPTCHA if we think someone might be a bot and it won't show it to people who look like they're not bots.

And then if they can't complete the reCAPTCHA, they won't be added to the list.

So it's really good at fighting bot signups and And then another caveat is if you're going to turn off your double opt-in or opt-in confirmation email, I just say make sure you're someone who actually like logs into your account, glances at your list every now and then.

Make sure you don't see anything crazy coming through and that you're someone who cleans your list often just in case people are coming in and they weren't super high quality subscribers.

Now, in order to illustrate this point in more detail, I want to tell you a sort of modern parable.

Consider reCAPTCHAs, those tests wherein we are periodically called on to perform acts of humanity online, the ones that ask you to click on all the tiles containing a photo of a bicycle or a bridge in order to proceed.

Now, CAPTCHA is a cute acronym for Completely Automated Public Touring Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.

The most familiar version of the test called reCAPTCHA was acquired by Google in 2009.

...

so somebody told you that there was a reCAPTCHA issue.

I got rid of that.

I fixed the website issue.

Third layer, CAPTCHA escalation.

ReCAPTCHA version 3 assigns a score based on user behavior without ever showing a challenge.

You don't even know you're being scored.

Automated browsers consistently score low.