Why Am I asked “Are you a Robot”?

All of you will have encountered a website asking ‘”are you a robot?”, or a CAPTCHA asking you to identify objects, when filling a form.

While these can be annoying, they are an import security measure. Unfortunately it is very easy to write a program which pretends to be human on a website. This means a nasty person could:

a) Flood your business with worthless messages, normally with links to dangerous sites.

b) Worse, they could be used to harass another individual by putting their email address as the contact in the form, where they would not doubt get acknowledgement follow up emails or receive marketing emails they never subscribed to.

Therefore it is always a good idea to protect forms with some sort of human detection element.