"If we can collect behavioural data from you, and it matches closely the behaviour of other humans, you are a human. Otherwise you're not a human."
Does anyone else get that feeling from the description of what Google is doing? I've tripped their "we think you are a bot" detection filter and been presented with a captcha countless times while using complex search queries and searching for relatively obscure things, and it's frankly very insulting and rather disturbing that they think someone who inputs "unusual" search queries, according to their measure, is not human. I have JS and cookies disabled so they definitely cannot track my mouse movements and I can't use this way of verifying "humanness", but what if they get rid of the regular captchas completely (based on the argument that eventually the only ones who will make use of and solve them are bots)? Then they'll basically be saying "you are a human only if you have a browser that supports these features, behave in this way, and act like every other human who does." The fact that Google is attempting to define and thus strongly normalise what is human behaviour is definitely a big red flag to me.
(Or maybe I'm really a bot, just an extremely intelligent one. :-)
Does anyone else get that feeling from the description of what Google is doing? I've tripped their "we think you are a bot" detection filter and been presented with a captcha countless times while using complex search queries and searching for relatively obscure things, and it's frankly very insulting and rather disturbing that they think someone who inputs "unusual" search queries, according to their measure, is not human. I have JS and cookies disabled so they definitely cannot track my mouse movements and I can't use this way of verifying "humanness", but what if they get rid of the regular captchas completely (based on the argument that eventually the only ones who will make use of and solve them are bots)? Then they'll basically be saying "you are a human only if you have a browser that supports these features, behave in this way, and act like every other human who does." The fact that Google is attempting to define and thus strongly normalise what is human behaviour is definitely a big red flag to me.
(Or maybe I'm really a bot, just an extremely intelligent one. :-)