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Google will now verify if you're a human by turning on your webcam and asking you to wave your hand
(docs.cloud.google.com)
The fuck it will.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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A bit hard given the lack of webcam.
What Webcam?
So we click the things that say can not do challenge and we’ll pick the alternatives, no?
"Accessibility
For users with accessibility needs who cannot use hand gestures to complete the challenge, reCAPTCHA continues to provide visual and audio challenges, and develop more accessible and secure alternatives."
No, they won't. They might try, mind you, but that's not happening. I'll sooner adapt to a piece of tape at the top of my screen than to this.
Lol.
yeah, so that's absolutely not happening. if it requires me to turn my cam on, I will just close the tab.
Further reason to avoid google's shit like the fuckin plague.
The videos are never associated with a user’s identity and are deleted after the verification process. Audio is never recorded.
My fat fucking ass do any of this. Google is just as data hungry as everyone else, they will absolutely save it, and feed it to their AI to enhance their ability to generate realistic people.
Exactly. In a few years, there will be some breach, and it will come out that Google "accidentally" saved everything, and they are shocked and appalled that the gosh darn AI that did it.
Exactly. Its what these companies do every time.
and there will be no punishment for it, because people are too lazy and stupid to stop using google, and government is to feckless and useless to properly hold megacorps accountable.
Bet they'll be "punished" by a 5 million dollar fine (which is like, couch money to google, and would probably be 0.005% of the money they made from doing it)
The fuck it will
Guess I'm not a human anymore
The Electric sheep dreams go hard though /s
Jokes on them. I run Linux on a 2017 MacBook Air and the camera doesn't work
I will not do this. Whatever services require this i will not use.
If I have to do this to log into my email one last time as I'm migrating out, I will write off all emails there as lost. If my phone makes me do it to unlock it, I will go out and by an iPhone on the spot. That makes me want to puke typing that out, because I hate iPhones, but I'll do it.
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Are webcams that ubiquitous nowadays? My monitors never had one, and I could never be arsed to buy an external one, but perhaps I'm the weird outlier here.
You're an outlier simply by being a desktop computer user instead of a laptop, phone, or tablet user.
the world would be a lot better if people went back to sitting at desks to use the computer/internet.
The videos are never associated with a user's identity and are deleted after the verification process. Audio is never recorded.
I actually believe them. It's gonna start out this way. But in a year or two, they'll quietly slip in a provision stating they will hold on to the images for a short time for security purposes, then they will say that they will associate your image with your identity to make it more secure, then Google's AI will know everything about everyone (and sell the info to the highest bidder)
I believe them as well from a very literal perspective. The video will be deleted but the metadata that is created from the video will not.
It should be considered a universal law of corporate behavior: any information that has theoretical value will eventually be sold.
Even if current management has no intention of exploiting it, they’ll be replaced by the board, or the division and its data will be spun off and sold for its IP—that’s how corporations work by nature (i.e., the purpose of a system is what it does).
~~Don't be evil~~
This will be like the proof of age face scans. Yes, the VIDEO is deleted, but the unique biometric code describing your face sure as hell won't be deleted. Focusing on deleting the video has got to be a deliberate distraction
That’s just v1. At some point they’ll realize that bots can deepfake a human waving and they’re going to want to truly verify it’s you by verifying the position of moles on your body… Then they’ll have to save your data… to secure your account!
Soon they’ll realize to get good mole data they’ll need you to show more skin, as some people don’t have much on their face and their clothing could be hiding those juicy datapoints.
That’s when v2 hits. Flash google your titties to secure your account, don’t worry it’s super secure and we never share your titties with law enforcement agencies unless it’s required by law!
You’ll be walking through your local library because tech has gone to far and you need to unplug but as you walk by the rows of shared computers it’ll all be old people flashing their titties at the screen to continue watching ads on YouTube.
The fuck it will
Calling it: In the future we will learn that they have been using it to gather face recognition data and have been using it to track their users in the real world by partnering with the likes of Flock.
Reasonable bet if they didn't already have root on devices in people's pockets, with cameras pointing at their faces for hours per day. Along with GPS, cell, WiFi and Bluetooth location services.
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I don't have a child, but if I a did have one, and they walked naked in front of the webcam, could I go after Google for CP?
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Do Google employees actually do anything other than sit around thinking of ways to make things worse? In the last few years we've had web environment integrity (thankfully that one seems to have been dropped), gutting the AOSP to the point where it's practically unusable on its own, Android developer verification, play integrity, QR code captchas and now this
Why wait? We can block their headquarters and wave a hand (and finger) now...
I'll wave my ding dong
Your Tralala?
Think I'll finish migrating away from google this weekend.
Don’t have one.
The only hand gesture I'm giving Google is:
🖕
It says in the docs:
"## Accessibility
For users with accessibility needs who cannot use hand gestures to complete the challenge, reCAPTCHA continues to provide visual and audio challenges, and develop more accessible and secure alternatives."
So it seems you can just do a different task if you don't want to do the hand thing anyway.
Edit: obligatory F google still of course.
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