No one likes CAPTCHA. They come out of the blue, when all you want to do is
get to the site you’re trying to visit. One second you’re clicking a link, the next, you’re identifying all the motorcycles on-screen, or moving a puzzle piece into a matching cutout.
There’s a good reason for CAPTCHA to exist, of course: As long as there are personal information and finances flowing through the internet, scammers will employ robots to steal it. CAPTCHA literally stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, and is designed to thwart these robots from their malicious goals.
However, they sometimes thwart our own ability to access the web. Often, CAPTCHAs are easy, just annoying. Occasionally, though, they’re tricky: Some of those scrambled numbers and letters are too difficult to make out even for humans, and after multiple failed attempts, you’re just about ready to quit whatever it was you were trying to do in the first place.
Google is working on a way to bypass CAPTCHA in Chrome
All that may be changing soon. Google is now testing a feature for Chrome that will save you from having to complete a CAPTCHA puzzle in many circumstances. The auto-verify feature allows a site to identify you as a real person when you’ve passed a CAPTCHA test in the past, and won’t ask you next time you visit. But even better than that, other sites can access this record if they so choose. Even if you never passed a CAPTCHA test with that site, they’ll know you verified your identity elsewhere, which is enough for them to let you pass without a new test.
Google says in the auto-verify setting’s page that the feature doesn’t identify you or allow sites to view your history, although sites can “share a small amount of info” in order for the verification to work. It doesn’t go into more detail about what that “info” is.
Twitter user Leopeva64 highlighted this new option back in April, although Google appears to have first introduced it in February:
How to skip CAPTCHA in Chrome using auto-verify
As this feature is still in testing, you won’t find it in Chrome on Mac or PC. Instead, you’ll need to download Chrome Canary, which Google uses to test new features and settings. You shouldn’t rely on Canary for your standard browsing, since it is made of unfinished features, but it can be a great way to test out what’s coming down the pipeline at Google.
Once installed on your computer, launch Chrome Canary, then go to Settings > Privacy and security > Site settings > Additional content settings > Auto-verify. It appears to be enabled by default, but make sure, then go about your browsing, and see how many (or how few) CAPTCHAs you end up encountering on your journey.
[Android Police]
