Why using Google's reCAPTCHA to protect your survey against bots is a bad idea

Beschreibung

"To prevent your survey from spam such as fraudulent respondents and bots, research suggest to implement some kind of CAPTCHA (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) (see Griffin et al 2021, Yarrish et al 2019, Brainard et al 2022, Xu et al 2022, Dupuis et al 2018, Pozzar et al 2020. Survey platforms offer to integrate Google’s reCAPTCHAs (e.g., Qualtrics, Zoho) or even emphasize their beneficial usage (e.g., Alchemer). I disagree. Implementing a CAPTCHA to restrict access to your survey is a bad idea. This short article discusses three reasons why. 1. ReCAPTCHAs increase response burden. As a result, respondents may be demotivated to respond. 2. ReCAPTCHAs may introduce additional selectivity into your survey, such as, excluding individuals with low computer literacy or visual disabilities. 3. ReCAPTCHAv3 has some serious privacy issues and is not GDPR compliant. By now, reCAPTCHAs have become very diverse in their functionality and visibility. Before I exaggerate on my three points above let us do a brief recap of the history of CAPTCHA. Furthermore, through out this post, I will focus on Google’s reCAPTCHAs as it is most widely used. However, there are other CAPTCHA services on which my argumentation may not apply." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Zitationshinweis

Haas, Georg-Christoph (2023): Why using Google's reCAPTCHA to protect your survey against bots is a bad idea. In: Medium : Human Stories & Ideas H. 01.03.2023.