Google's hand-gesture reCAPTCHA wants access to your camera

- reCAPTCHA is Google's widely used CAPTCHA system that tries to distinguish human users from automated bots (e.g., spam bots scraping websites). It has evolved from typing distorted text to clicking "I am not a robot" checkboxes, to selecting images of traffic lights or crosswalks — all of which train Google's AI as a side effect. - The new "hand gesture" version, currently in testing, asks users to position their hand in front of their webcam and perform a gesture (e.g., making a peace sign or raising a palm). This would require granting the website camera access, raising privacy and surveillance concerns compared to earlier methods that involved only clicking or image selection. - Google has faced criticism before over reCAPTCHA's data collection (e.g., using the traffic-light selections to train self-driving car AI). The hand-gesture proposal extends that pattern into biometric data, which is harder to change if compromised.