"For most users, this dramatically simplifies the experience," Shet says. "They basically get a free pass. You can solve the CAPTCHA without having to solve it." But Google didn't develop this software just to make people's lives easier. Last year, announced it had developed software that can solve any type of color steel sheet with at least 90 percent accuracy. Before that, spammers hired in places like Russia and Southeast Asia.

The new system measures the person's entire engagement with the CAPTCHA — before, during and after he interacts with it. While Google's new reCAPTCHAs will inevitably save the user time and a headache, it raises privacy concerns. Google already has access to droves of personal information, but now it can identify a person by simple movements. However, Shet says Google will only be able to track a user's movements over the reCAPTCHA widget and not the entire Web page. Samantha Raphelson is a digital news intern at NPR.org. You can reach out to her on .

They paid them sweatshop wages — about 75 cents for every 1,000 CAPTCHAs solved. (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) were developed in 2000 to protect websites from spam and abuse. By confirming a user is human, CAPTCHAs stopped automated bots from creating fake email addresses to spam you or from snatching up all the tickets to a concert. Early CAPTCHAs had evenly spaced letters and numbers that computers could easily decipher.

As CAPTCHAs became more advanced they used scrunched up characters to make it more difficult for computers to translate. , an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who helped develop CAPTCHA, realized that CAPTCHAs were wasting people's time and brain power. "Approximately 200 million of these are typed every day by people around the world. Each time you type one of these, essentially you waste about 10 seconds of your time," he told NPR in 2008. "If you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity as a whole is wasting around 500,000 hours every day, typing these annoying squiggly characters." So he came up with a way to kill two birds with one stone. His software, , used CAPTCHAs to digitize old books and newspapers. The two words presented came directly from scanned books. The company was sold to Google in 2009. But programs were built to decode those too.

Vicarious' software is one of the first that can separate and distinguish each letter. Google has been . On Valentine's Day, the company tested its new software by showing users undistorted words like "Love" and "Flowers" and relied on "" to distinguish between humans and bots.