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

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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.


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hilzfuld

Hillel Fuld is a global speaker, entrepreneur, journalist, vlogger, and leading startup advisor. He brings over a decade of marketing experience with leading Israeli and Silicon Valley startups, and currently collaborates with many global brands in an official marketing capacity including Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Huawei, and others.      Hillel covers the dynamic local tech scene for many leading publications including Entrepreneur magazine, Inc, TechCrunch, Mashable, The Next Web, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, Venturebeat, and others. Additionally, Hillel mentors startups across Israel in different accelerators including The Google Launchpad, the Microsoft Ventures accelerator, Techstars, The Junction, and more.    Hillel has been named Israel’s top marketer, 7th top tech blogger worldwide, has been featured on CNBC, Inc, and was dubbed by Forbes as “The Man Transforming Startup Nation into Scale-up Nation”.       Hillel has hundreds of thousands of followers across the social web and can be found on Twitter at @Hilzfuld. You can learn more about him on his website: www.hilzfuld.com

 

8 thoughts on “What Really Happens When you Fill out a CAPTCHA (VIDEO)

  1. I have thoght for a while that they use digital books or something for those words. Now I feel much better that we’re actualy helping rather than it being annoying – thanks

  2. so we teach the computer to read wonky characters
    so we end up with captcha’s being useless for security on websites
    Am I the only one that sees this as self defeating?

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