September 15, 2009

The Google Privacy Policy describes how we treat personal information when you use Google's products and services, including information provided when you use reCAPTCHA. In addition, the following describes our privacy practices that are specific to reCAPTCHA.

Use of information we receive

The reCAPTCHA service provides images and/or audio clips that are useful for distinguishing between human beings and computers for the purposes of preventing abuse of a website. When an end-user submits a solution of one of the images or clips on a site that uses reCAPTCHA, that site sends the solution to us (along with other information) and we determine whether the user has solved the image or clip sufficiently well that it is likely that the user is a human being and not a computer. We then relay to the website the determination of whether or not the user is likely a human being. We also use solutions of some of the images to digitize text that is not readable by computers, which helps digitize materials such as books, newspapers and old-time radio shows. These digitized materials may be used by other Google services, for example Google Books.

Other than these end-user-supplied solutions, any data collected from the sites that use reCAPTCHA will be used only to provide, maintain, protect, and improve reCAPTCHA and other Google anti-spam services. We log information related to reCAPTCHA, such as the Internet Protocol address of the end-user, the URL of the site accessed, the captcha solution, the result of the captcha grading, the date and time of requests, and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify the end-user browser. In our logs, we will delete any information that identifies the site implementing reCAPTCHA within 30 days of the event logged, but may retain aggregate information related to each implementing site (but not individual pages within those sites).

More information

Google adheres to the US Safe Harbor privacy principles. For more information about the Safe Harbor framework or our registration, see the Department of Commerce's web site.

For more information about our privacy practices, go to the full privacy policy. If you have additional questions, please contact us any time. Or write to us at:

Privacy Matters
c/o Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043 (USA)