They serve as a gateway, preventing basic bots and fraudsters from accessing a website.īut while attack technology has evolved, CAPTCHAs have not kept up with the times. Should this be the case? Shouldn’t there be another way to prove users’ humanity and detect bots? Do CAPTCHAs even work anymore? Companies feel they must use it, and consumers (somewhat begrudgingly) accept it. According to BuiltWith, more than one-third of the top 100,000 websites use CAPTCHAs. The technology has been around for a while, and it’s well ingrained as a normal part of doing business on the internet.
The most common type of CAPTCHA (displayed as Version 1.0) was first invented in 1997 by two groups working in parallel.”Ĭurrently there are more than twenty vendors providing CAPTCHAs, with reCAPTCHA from Google in use on more than 6 million websites. So, if it doesn’t offer the protection it once did, and its major accomplishment for the past 12 years is that it slows down the customer purchase process, we have to ask ourselves: Why are CAPTCHAs still a thing? Where did CAPTCHA come from?Īccording to Wikipedia, CAPTCHA “…was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. As far back as 2009, companies were complaining about the technology, saying that it was imperfect, difficult, and drove some customers away from completing a purchase. The other problem with CAPTCHAs is the way they affect your conversion rates. Unfortunately, the process is far from foolproof, and these days it can be easily bypassed by cybercriminals.
I’m, of course, referring to CAPTCHAs, the online security tool that asks end users to prove they’re human by recognizing specific elements in various images. The success of your online business hinges on your customers’ ability to properly recognize crosswalks or traffic lights.