This page explains how you can provide feedback on the accuracy of the assessments created by reCAPTCHA. With this information, reCAPTCHA can tune your site-specific model and provide improved performance for your site over time.
When to annotate assessments
reCAPTCHA provides a score when creating an assessment that
helps you understand the level of risk user interactions pose.
Later, when your site has more information about user interactions
to determine if the interaction was legitimate or fraudulent, you can confirm or
correct reCAPTCHA's assessment. To do this, you send the
reCAPTCHA assessment IDs back to Google labeled as LEGITIMATE
or FRAUDULENT
.
Confirming or correcting
reCAPTCHA's assessment improves the performance of
reCAPTCHA for your site.
To improve the performance of reCAPTCHA, you can confirm the
annotations for true positives and true negatives in addition to the
annotations for potential assessment errors.
For example, for a user who successfully authenticated using
a 2-factor-authentication method and received a high reCAPTCHA score, you can
annotate the assessment as LEGITIMATE
. Alternatively, if reCAPTCHA
score was low and your site determined that the interaction was fraudulent or
abusive, you can annotate the assessment as FRAUDULENT
.
The following list shows additional information about some sample user interactions that indicate whether a user interaction is legitimate or fraudulent:
- Credit card chargebacks or other concrete evidence of fraud indicate that an earlier financial transaction was fraudulent.
- A new account that sends messages that are flagged as spam by other users might indicate that the account creation was fraudulent.
- A support case filed if a user has difficulty logging in to their account might indicate that the login attempt is legitimate.
- A purchase or booking on a site that uses reCAPTCHA to defend against scraping might indicate that the user is legitimate.
Before you begin
Ensure that you have the following Identity and Access Management role: reCAPTCHA Enterprise Agent (
roles/recaptchaenterprise.agent
).Depending on where you have set up reCAPTCHA, complete the appropriate step:
Retrieve the assessment ID
To annotate an assessment, retrieve the unique assessment ID in the following ways:
For web and mobile integrations, you can retrieve the unique assessment ID from the assessment response.
After you create an assessment, you receive a JSON response as shown in the following example.
Retrieve the unique assessment ID from the
name
field in the JSON response.{ 'tokenProperties': { 'valid': True, 'hostname': 'www.google.com', 'action': 'homepage', 'createTime': u'2019-03-28T12:24:17.894Z' }, 'riskAnalysis': { 'score': 0.1, 'reasons': ['AUTOMATION'] }, 'event': { 'token': 'RESPONSE_TOKEN', 'siteKey': 'KEY_ID' }, 'name': 'ASSESSMENT_ID' }
For WAF integrations, you can retrieve the unique assessment ID from the reCAPTCHA token. The unique assessment ID is the unique alphanumeric string of 16 characters that appears at the end of the reCAPTCHA token after
:U=
. For example, if the reCAPTCHA token is.................U=6ZZZZe73fZZZZZZ0
, then the assessment ID is6ZZZZe73fZZZZZZ0
.
Annotate an assessment
Determine the information and labels to add in the request JSON body depending on your use case.
The following table lists the labels and values that you can use to annotate events:
Label Description Request example reasons
Optional. A label to support your assessments. Provide real-time event details in the
reasons
label in a few seconds or minutes after the event because they influence real-time detection.For the list of possible values, see reasons values.
Example: To detect account takeovers, annotate if the entered password was correct with
CORRECT_PASSWORD
orINCORRECT_PASSWORD
values. If you deployed your own MFA, you can add the following values:INITIATED_TWO_FACTOR
, andPASSED_TWO_FACTOR
orFAILED_TWO_FACTOR
.{ "reasons": ["INCORRECT_PASSWORD"] }
annotation
Optional. A label to indicate the legitimacy of assessments. Provide facts about login and registration events to validate or correct your risk assessments in the
annotation
label.Possible values:
LEGITIMATE
orFRAUDULENT
.You can send this information at any time or as part of a batch job. However, we recommend sending this information in a few seconds or minutes after the event because they influence real-time detection.
{ "annotation": "LEGITIMATE" }
Annotate an assessment using the
projects.assessments.annotate
method with the gcloud CLI or an API key.gcloud CLI
Before using any of the request data, make the following replacements:
- ASSESSMENT_ID: Value of the
name
field returned from theprojects.assessments.create
call. - ANNOTATION_LABEL: The label to indicate whether the assessment is legitimate or fraudulent.
Possible values are
LEGITIMATE
orFRAUDULENT
. - ANNOTATION_REASON: Describes the context for the annotation that was chosen for this assessment. To learn about possible values, see reasons for annotating an assessment.
HTTP method and URL:
POST https://recaptchaenterprise.googleapis.com/v1/ASSESSMENT_ID:annotate
Request JSON body:
{ "annotation": "ANNOTATION_LABEL" "reasons": "ANNOTATION_REASON" }
To send your request, choose one of these options:
curl
Save the request body in a file named
request.json
, and execute the following command:curl -X POST \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
-d @request.json \
"https://recaptchaenterprise.googleapis.com/v1/ASSESSMENT_ID:annotate"PowerShell
Save the request body in a file named
request.json
, and execute the following command:$cred = gcloud auth print-access-token
$headers = @{ "Authorization" = "Bearer $cred" }
Invoke-WebRequest `
-Method POST `
-Headers $headers `
-ContentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8" `
-InFile request.json `
-Uri "https://recaptchaenterprise.googleapis.com/v1/ASSESSMENT_ID:annotate" | Select-Object -Expand ContentYou should receive a successful status code (2xx) and an empty response.
API key
Before using any of the request data, make the following replacements:
- ASSESSMENT_ID: Value of the
name
field returned from theprojects.assessments.create
call - ANNOTATION_LABEL: The label to indicate whether the assessment is legitimate or fraudulent.
Possible values are
LEGITIMATE
orFRAUDULENT
. - ANNOTATION_REASON: Describes the context for the annotation that was chosen for this assessment. To learn about possible values, see reasons for annotating an assessment.
HTTP method and URL:
POST https://recaptchaenterprise.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/assessments/ASSESSMENT_ID:annotate?key=API_KEY
Request JSON body:
{ "annotation": "ANNOTATION_LABEL" "reasons": "ANNOTATION_REASON" }
To send your request, choose one of these options:
curl
Save the request body in a file named
request.json
, and execute the following command:curl -X POST \
-H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
-d @request.json \
"https://recaptchaenterprise.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/assessments/ASSESSMENT_ID:annotate?key=API_KEY"PowerShell
Save the request body in a file named
request.json
, and execute the following command:$headers = @{ }
Invoke-WebRequest `
-Method POST `
-Headers $headers `
-ContentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8" `
-InFile request.json `
-Uri "https://recaptchaenterprise.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/assessments/ASSESSMENT_ID:annotate?key=API_KEY" | Select-Object -Expand ContentYou should receive a successful status code (2xx) and an empty response.
- ASSESSMENT_ID: Value of the
What's next
- Learn about the user accounts protection features of reCAPTCHA.