What Really Happens When you Fill out a CAPTCHA (VIDEO)

Posted on 05. Oct, 2010 by hilzfuld in Web

By: Hillel Fuld

OK, how annoying are CAPTCHAs? If you do not know what the heck I am talking about, CAPTCHAs are those words you need to write on sites like Facebook and recently LinkedIn in order to prove  you are human. You know the ones that you can rarely read yourself? Yes, they are annoying and have become quite a burden on the heavy Web surfer, but truth be told, filling out a word or two is a whole lot better than spammers taking over the Web.

Having said that, I used to believe there had to be a better way to prevent spam than annoying users . That is until a friend, Susan Elaine Cooper (who you should totally follow on Twitter) pointed me in the direction of this amazing video of what really happens when we fill out those annoying CAPTCHAs. Side note, Susan sent me this video in response to an article in the Wall Street Journal about a company that is taking CAPTCHAs and turning them into ads, which is an interesting concept in and of itself. You can read more that here.

The video is 11 minutes but I highly recommend you watch it, it will definitely shed some light on the matter and give you a much better feeling next time you have to fill out a CAPTCHA.

Update: For those who do not have 11 minutes to spare, I will sum it up for you. If you do not like spoilers, stop reading now and watch the video. By filling out these CAPTCHAs we are helping to digitize written media, such as books, one word at a time.

Tags: captcha, captcha write, web security, web spam