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Intro: Popular Bot Protection vs Modern Alternative
The rust on traditional CAPTCHA is getting more and more visible. Probably you are looking for something stronger and more user-friendly than CAPTCHA. Something that can protect you from advanced bots or abusive humans. We totally get you. You are not alone. Thousands of platforms are desperately waiting for the next generation of bot protection. You have come to the right place for answers.
Let's see how CAPTCHA compares to more modern approaches. We will take a deep dive into the pros and cons of Trusted Accounts methods for bot protection and what role CAPTCHA still plays. And even more importantly, where its limitations lie.
What is CAPTCHA and what CAPTCHA solutions are there?
CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". The term was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford. (Wikipedia, 2024) So CAPTCHA has been around for a long time and used to stop automated bots quite well. And it still does if you know where to use it and how to combine it.
The bigger problem with CAPTCHA has always been that it cannot protect you from abusive humans at all. A single human is capable of creating hundreds or even thousands of fake accounts on your platform. As AI becomes more human-like and sophisticated, this problem is only getting worse.
CAPTCHA seems to have no answer to today's challenge, leaving many platform managers and developers frustrated. To make matters worse, the bots that can now easily bypass CAPTCHA are also more harmful, as they have access to highly sophisticated abusive AI-generated content and AI-assisted methods. You may have heard of the "Dead Internet" theory. It basically describes an Internet where bots have taken over. (Forbes, 2024) Well, let’s postpone that for a little while.
reCAPTCHA: The dominating CAPTCHA solution
reCAPTCHA is the world's most popular CAPTCHA service. With an amazing 12 million active platforms using it. And 21% of the top 1 million platforms. (BuiltWith, Nov 2024) reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA service provided by Google. Since Google has a business model that is known to be based on user data, the use of CAPTCHA on platforms has decreased recently. User privacy on the Internet is becoming more and more important around the world. But since Google certainly has some user data to use for their evaluations, their CAPTCHA service is on the stronger end when it comes to security.
Check out reCAPTCHA.
hCAPTCHA: The CAPTCHA with privacy focus
User privacy has become increasingly important to the platforms, which we can clearly see in the usage statistics of hCAPTCHA. hCAPTCHA is a privacy preserving alternative to reCAPTCHA. As reCAPTCHA usage declines, hCAPTCHA usage skyrockets. hCAPTCHA has doubled its market share from less than 1% to 1.9% of the top 10M platforms in about six months. (BuiltWith, Nov 2024)
Basically, the main difference between reCAPTCHA and hCAPTCHA is privacy. They both offer both invisible and visible CAPTCHA services. For the visible CAPTCHA, users are asked to select images based on a hint provided by the CAPTCHA. This method is becoming less effective as AI advances.
hCAPTCHA does offer pro versions that cost you. But you know what they say, if it is free, you are the product. Here you can find their free and pro plans.
Check out hCAPTCHA.
As bots get better, CAPTCHA has to get better as well. Sometimes resulting in something like this:
Friendly CAPTCHA: The CAPTCHA focused on user experience
Friendly CAPTCHA is based on proof-of-work. While it focuses on user experience by not showing any challenges for the user to solve, it actually lacks security. Proof-of-Work does not check if a user is real, but it does make it more costly for bots and abusive users to spam your platform because they have to use processing power to pass the CAPTCHA.
friendlyCAPTCHA presents a mathematical challenge to your user's device in the background. Your user's device needs some processing power to solve this challenge. For large bot farms this can get expensive.
Check out Friendly CAPTCHA.
The Problems with CAPTCHA
1. Bots can easily circumvent CAPTCHA
It is fair to say that there are publicly available AI solutions that can easily solve the image-based puzzles of CAPTCHA. It used to be that spammers and bot farms had to at least pay for so-called "CAPTCHA farms", where real people would solve tons of CAPTCHA challenges for bots. But as AI has become more advanced and cheaper than "CAPTCHA farms", this was probably the first job to be replaced by AI.
Disinformation, mainly spread by bots and trolls, is the biggest risk for the next two years. (World Economic Forum, 2024) And CAPTCHA has so far failed to solve it for a reason.
2. Traditional CAPTCHA has poor user experience
CAPTCHA is known to have a poor user experience. It takes a user 10 seconds to solve a simple image CAPTCHA. Enough time to drive thousands of users away from your platform.
However, as image CAPTCHA challenges no longer provide sufficient protection against bad bots, CAPTCHA has moved more and more into the background. reCAPTCHAv3, for example, does not even display its puzzles. While this does not help with the security issue, it at least improves the usability.
3. Some CAPTCHA providers lack user privacy
Google's reCAPTCHA, for example, is not known to be the most friendly service out there. Google has a business model in which the collection of user data has played a central role for years. This has left some room for competitors like hCAPTCHA or friendlyCAPTCHA, which claim to be more privacy friendly.
What is Trusted Accounts?
1. All the Tools you need in Addition to CAPTCHA
Trusted Accounts is a modern user validation and verification service that protects your platform from modern AI and abusive humans. It gives you the tools that VLOPs (Very Large Online Platforms) have (but not always use enough) to detect and deal with trolls and bots.
2. Fast & Easy Integration Bot Protection
Integrated into your platform with just 3 lines of code, Trusted Accounts gives you sophisticated tools like browser fingerprinting, VPN, datacenter and consistency checks. All of which tell you how trustworthy a user is. Here you can learn how to integrate Trusted Accounts.
3. Customizable Security Settings for your Requirements
To protect the most sensitive areas of your platform, you can even require your users to verify with a unique and trusted phone number. Trusted Accounts completely anonymizes all personal information with a Zero-PII approach, validates phone numbers with VoIP checks, and ensures they are unique and trusted. For maximum security while maintaining user privacy.
4. Optimized User Experience for User Validation
For your users, Trusted Accounts is easy to use. It focuses on a seamless user experience to maximize successful user validations and verifications. You can even set your own branding to avoid disruptions to your corporate identity throughout the user validation process.
Trusted Accounts & CAPTCHA: A Strong Combination
A single user can keep 10 moderators busy. What platforms need is to know if a user is a real person and to quickly identify harmful accounts. Utilizing CAPTCHA with Trusted Accounts completes the picture to build a strong protection for your platform.
Let the next generation of CAPTCHA take the stage. Trusted Accounts validates that your users are real, and more importantly, unique. Fully customizable, easy to integrate, and with a seamless user experience.
Feature Comparison Table
It's time to give the Internet back to the people. That's why we exist. So let's take a deeper dive before we equip you with all the tools you need for effective bot and troll protection with this list of do's and don't for CAPTCHA and Trusted Accounts.
Use Cases: When to Choose Which?
It's a difference if you just want to protect a public form from as much spam as possible, or if you want to validate or even verify a logged-in user.
1. CAPTCHA works best for simple public forms
CAPTCHA is strongest for public forms that you want to protect from bots. It will still help you stop most bots from automatically submitting it a thousand times. It will not help you with abusive humans, nor will it protect you from bots that use modern AI.
To protect a public form that is only available to non-logged-in users of your platform, CAPTCHA is still the best method available. But you will not be able to tell if your users are real and unique.
2. CAPTCHA is not enough for comment sections
To protect your comment section, you need to do more than just keep out dumb bots that are unable to circumvent a traditional CAPTCHA. You may already be spending a lot of nerves and/or money on user and content moderation.
- Get an AI hate detection tool: We can highly recommend a tool from our partners at the ETH Zurich, called Bot Dog. But it is limited to French and German. If you want a broader tool, there is of course Perspective API from Google.
- Make sure your users are unique: With Trusted Accounts' unique user validation tools. What good is detecting a hater, bot or troll if they can create new accounts over and over again? With Trusted Accounts, you can easily identify accounts created by the same users for effective moderation.
- Still use CAPTCHA: CAPTCHA may not be the most efficient tool anymore, but that does not mean you can live without it. It will still help you protect the comments section of your platform from a lot of hobby haters playing around with their homemade bots.
- Shadow banning: In the EU, shadow banning is mostly forbidden by the transparency regulation of the DSA (Digital Service Act). It basically means that you can no longer hide a user's content on your platform without the user being aware of it. The aim of shadow banning was to prevent banned users from creating new accounts because they do not even know they have been banned. However, it is better to use Trusted Accounts to get fake accounts under control. It is more transparent and safer.
- User rating systems: While this can also become dangerous once bad actors know how you generate the trust level of your users, it can be a good idea to rate your users. For example, you might not want newly registered users to comment on your platform without first reviewing their comments. Users who have posted several high quality comments and have had an active subscription for some time may be more trustworthy.
3. CAPTCHA does not work in surveys
For surveys, not knowing if your users are unique could mean that your results or statistics are simply irrelevant. By only using CAPTCHA you may not be able to effectively block abusive users or bots. Once you block them, you have nothing to identify those users by. So they will just create new accounts over and over again. Trusted Accounts can help you here by identifying duplicate accounts created by abusive users or bots.
4. Bot protection against fraud in online stores
For online businesses and fraudulent activity, you need a combination of things to protect your platform. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as 100% security on the Internet.
- User Verification: User verification is still the strongest way to protect your online store from abuse. Typically, this means that your users have to verify themselves with a passport or ID document. This is quite a hurdle for most users and you may lose some of them along the way, so be careful where you use it. There are many established providers on the market like veriff, Yoti or Onfido. But user verification has also suffered from the recent development of AI. Established user verification providers have reported that bad actors have recently used AI-generated passports and avatars to pass thousands of user validation checks.
- User Validation: In addition to user verification, and for less sensitive areas, it helps to validate your users. User validation, such as through Trusted Accounts, can tell you that a user is unique and trustworthy without requiring any user interaction. This approach is more user friendly, but of course also less secure.
- CAPTCHA: Once again, CAPTCHA cannot be ignored. Even for online shops, CAPTCHA can still help you protect against less sophisticated bots. Use a modern invisible CAPTCHA with full privacy to get extra security without compromising usability or user privacy.
Trusted Accounts is strongest in combination with CAPTCHA. Use CAPTCHA to protect your platform from most automated bot attacks. Use Trusted Accounts to validate your users, know they are unique, and easily detect duplicate and fake accounts.
The Future of Bot Protection and CAPTCHA
As bots and trolls become more sophisticated, so must the tools to protect platforms from abuse, from fraud to disinformation and hate. Bot protection is an ever-evolving area of technology with a lot at stake. While CAPTCHA is moving more and more into the background, it is still a useful tool to protect public areas of your platform. But the challenges have grown, and more modern bot protection and CATPCHA alternatives like Trusted Accounts are emerging.
Make sure you stay on top of the latest bot protection tools, and take advantage of different vendors and technologies, from AI detection to content moderation to bot protection.
A final word on user privacy: You will regularly hear voices claiming that we must compromise user privacy in order to effectively protect platforms from fraud and abuse. But there are effective tools out there that work perfectly in conjunction with Trusted Accounts and also take a zero-PII approach. Try them before you give in to the data octopus.
Conclusion
Since CAPTCHA is no match for modern AI tools, it is still useful for less sensitive areas of your platform. To build a trustworthy platform, you need to know if your users are real and unique. This is the only way to have efficient moderation, save costs and be ready for the age of AI. Trusted Accounts is here to complement your current security measures and provide you with all the additional security tools you need for state-of-the-art bot protection. Gain a competitive advantage while protecting our society from abuse, disinformation, or fraud.
Let's build a more human web together. 🖖
