Selenium by default creates a new profile, so it has no cookies or browsing history. Maybe I don't have any cookies or browsing history?.So the browser starts up, I type in the URL, I click a few other links, I come back to the login page, type in username + password, then proceed to click on the captcha box.and I'm a bot. There are many theories that talk about things like mouse movement, keyboard strokes, etc. So I tried a few different things to try to look more human: Which of course means a lot of stuff is going on under the hood, but perhaps the selenium instance of firefox is not 'human' enough? So I'm doing nothing much but starting firefox, using selenium. I decided to launch firefox using this piece of java code WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(new FirefoxProfile()) I then became curious what was the difference between me launching firefox through the executable, and me launching firefox through selenium. I started up a regular instance of firefox (that is, without selenium), went to the website, clicked the checkbox, and it determined that I was a human and let me go. Recently the website changed their login system by adding google's reCAPTCHA, and everytime I try to click the checkbox, google determines that I am a bot and asks me to select a bunch of images.

I use selenium to start up firefox and log onto a website to scrape some data a few times a day.

Preface: my goal is not to solve captcha using automation tools, but to attempt to understand why a browser that is being launched by selenium is being identified as a bot in the first place, and how selenium contributes to this.

Selenium recaptcha bypass