Trego's Mountain Ear

Sometimes, things look like they’re doing one thing, but are secretly doing something else. Those internet CAPTCHA tests are a good result.

Identify some warped sequence of letters and numbers, or more recently pick out items in pictures, and that proves you aren’t a robot? Not quite.

What actually proves you aren’t a robot is clicking that little box, which gives the CAPTCHA test permission to look at your recent activities. Which ones? Everything from your cursor movement to your recent browsing history.

Who are you giving permission to do this to? Probably google, since google is the major provider of CAPTCHA tests.

And did you have to do one of those to efile your taxes with the state of Montana this year? Sure did. Online CAPTCHA tests are pretty much ubiquitous; even our state government is asking us to give google permission to look at our browsing history.