I haven't personally experienced any situation like this and it will probably be a tough one to troubleshoot.

My best guess is that it has to do with your privacy extensions that you have installed. Most of the popular CAPTCHAs use your browsing data (history, etc) to determine whether or not you are a human.

However, if one of your extensions (my guess would be Privacy Badger) is limiting the website's access to your browsing data, the CAPTCHA system will probably have no idea and just force you to manually confirm.

The Amazon support team probably was able to disable the option for the user in the thread that you referenced. However, since that thread is so old, it's very possible that's no longer possible for the Amazon team to do.

The only real option I can think of is to try running in Safe Mode for a while or disabling your privacy extensions for a bit, to see if the problem continues or if it's linked to one of those. Keep in mind that you would have to do this for an extended period of time in order to build up a browser history that the CAPTCHA service deems to be "human" enough.

Hope this helps.

Good explanation. I didn't know that CAPTCHA services tend to use browsing data to gauge "humaness". Time will tell.

Yes, CAPCHAs have become very complex.

For example, Google's reCAPCHA service (which is the most popular and I think the one that Amazon uses) will take data from websites that have Google's tracking code (no Google account required) to make sure that your history is human enough.

Google also has other versions of their reCAPCHA service that can measure the mouse movement speed, mouse positioning and button press duration to determine if you are human. That's how the reCAPCHA that is just a single checkbox works, as well as the one where you have to select all of the images that contain XXXXXXXX.

My understanding is that in cat and mouse game to trick CAPTCHA's, bots got advanced enough to try to beat the game. As a result, those in-the-know are tight-lipped about how the algorithms work precisely.

What I did was create a special Firefox profile to watch my Amazon Prime movies without the fuss of CAPTHCA's because I want to relax. It won't have my usual extensions and tight cookie settings. According to section 2.1 of https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-16/materials/asia-16-Sivakorn-Im-Not-a-Human-Breaking-the-Google-reCAPTCHA-wp.pdf Amazon's CAPTCHA service will hopefully know I'm not a bot in about 9 days worth of browsing data.

THANKS for the help!

Hopefully that will work for you.

The developers of the CAPCHA are certainly very tight lipped about how they work exactly so that people can't fool the system, but there are a lot of general facts and theories about their inner workings.

Basically, they've just had add more layers of security since computers have become smart enough to solve the old-fashioned jumbled text CAPCHA from years ago.

joeTheUser said

What I did was create a special Firefox profile to watch my Amazon Prime movies without the fuss of CAPTHCA's because I want to relax. It won't have my usual extensions and tight cookie settings.

For the benefit of future visitors who experience this, a new special Firefox profile WORKED IMMEDIATELY without sacrificing anything.

The profile has no extensions, and under Privacy & Security Settings, Content Blocking is "Standard", uncheck "delete cookies & data when FF is closed" and under History, "remember history".

The orginal, secured profile is not effected. Care should also be taken to clear some Firefox data check boxes in disk-clearing software.

(And used Google as search.)