8. CAPTCHAs

Hi, I am Greg and I want to grumble about CAPTCHA. You may not recognise the name, but it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Now that name alone should tell you something of the complexity of the beast, but in less formal language, CAPTCHAs are those bloody annoying text and number patterns that you have to enter on an increasing number of websites before you can post online messages or sign up to services.

I’m sorry, maybe my brain is not abstract enough, but sometimes I just can’t see letters in the patterns, or the letters are so distorted that they could be any of 3 or 4 different ones. So I sit there reloading the screen until I get a set of letters and numbers that I can actually read. And I am told that the audio versions are no less confusing.

Now given that I have spent the last seven weeks grumbling about elections and matters of national importance, you might think that issues with CAPTCHA are a bit trivial. Well, if you have a vision impairment or are using one of the various programs designed to assist you to read online – and therefore to connect to the digital world, guess what, the very secure CAPTCHA system just blocked your participation in that world. Ditto if you have a learning disability like dyslexia. You won’t be able to sign up to basic services like gmail and skype, comment on that article that everyone else is talking about or do that business transaction online. Ah, I think that’s called discrimination!

And what does it say when a device that is designed to tell humans from non-humans, excludes someone with a vision or learning disability from the category of “human”. Would we accept any real person saying that someone with a disability was not human?

It is not even clear that CAPTCHA is needed for security purposes. I am sure it wasn’t needed (but it was there) on my online inquiry last week about whether a particular caravan park had a vacancy at the end of the year. Even on more serious transactions, there are several alternative methods of proving web users are human rather than spamming computers. Some of these also have drawbacks, but as a spam-busting device, the discriminatory CAPTCHAs are not necessarily “bot-proof” and can be defeated by equally smart non-humans.

Now it is not just me grumbling about CAPTCHA. The leading telecommunications consumer voice, ACCAN, which is the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network – has begun a campaign to “kill CAPTCHA”. They are calling on organisations with websites using CAPTCHAs to phase out the skewed and confusing text devices. There is also an online petition which asks for their phase out. Sound good to me.

Let’s kill CAPTCHA – but until then, I am Greg and I am grumbling. 

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast at https://radio.adelaide.edu.au/gregs-grumbles-8/ 

First Broadcast: 24 September 2013