I read that today captchas are validated using mouse movement tracking. How do they work on touch screen devices?
In: Technology
We can’t answer the question.
They do a lot of things the people who make them intentionally keep mysterious because part of how they make money is keeping their methods a secret. So even if you guess every detail of what they’re doing, their answer will be something like, “Maybe… but there’s a lot more we do.”
So there’s anything from mouse movement tracking to the amount of time before you click, to WHERE you click, to the amount of time you hold the button down, to how your finger moves while holding it down, the moon phase, and any number of other bits of data they may or may not be able to access.
I find on phones I’m far more likely to get the “tap the pictures with microscopic stairs” kind of captcha. That probably implies they don’t trust the things they look at on phones as much, or that the way I use a phone looks sus to them.
“Mouse movement tracking” is one aspect of it. There’s also the time to takes for you to respond, if you scroll, basically your entire interaction with the captcha.
On a touchscreen, some of that still applies: how long before you do anything, do you scroll? But where you touch the screen is effectively your mouse movement. You might think you just click a box. But your finger moves as you do this. It stays on the screen for a length of time. There are other factors to it, not just an instantaneous tap.
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