Selenium webdriver detected by a website ? Bug ?

[Dorothy Brown]

Hello,

I'm new in Selenium, and I have started to play with the webdriver Firefox, when I have decided to create manually a gmail account in the webdriver (it was a mistake). And when it was created, I go to youtube, log in my account just created, and redirected me to a page of support.google which said me that my account is disabled.

After this, I have recreated a new gmail account using my navigator without the webdriver and no problem, but this previous problem made me curious and started to search how they can find that we are using a webdriver, maybe it's a bug ? Or they can really find that we're using a webdriver ?

Thanks.

[David]

That's an interesting observation. I'm interested in the answer/discussion.

My hypothesis is that Google doesn't necessarily detect specifically Selenium/WebDriver, but by timing/speed of the account creation. Bare in mind that Selenium and any automated (ro)bot will obviously create (or sign up) an account very fast, much faster than how a normal human does it. So by detecting the speed at which the account was created (from server or client side), Google can guess whether it was a bot or not that created it, and bot created ones = to disable.

One could also test my hypothesis by using an alternate tool to create account: making HTTP requests without going through UI - sorta like screen scraping, and using Google APIs; using AutoIt; using Sikuli; using QTP; using watir; using Appium; using ios-driver; etc. If same result happens then Google didn't detect Selenium but rather something else like timing. If result different, then maybe they do detect Selenium.

[Mohammed abdul haseeb]

Hi all, i am also new to selenium, i have create a tool using c#.net and selenium Firefox driver to fill the Gmail signup page,only filling signup page is automated,submitting details and all next steps are manual. The problem is account is getting create and getting disable in no seconds. Can any one advice me on this please..You can also mail me your suggestion on my mail id mabdulh...@gmail.com. waiting for ur suggestions ...

[Shawn McCarthy]

The simple answer is, stop trying to automate Gmail signup. It is probably not allowed, as per there terms of service.

[Andreas Tolfsen]

Shawn McCarthy <shawn.m...@gmail.com> writes:

> The simple answer is, stop trying to automate Gmail signup. It is
> probably not allowed, as per there terms of service.

Shawn is absolutely correct. I’ll add my strong support here.

All standard conformant driver implementations will in the future add a
"webdriver" IDL attribute to the navigator object in the future so that
sites can explicitly disallow WebDriver from running against them.

http://w3c.github.io/webdriver/webdriver-spec.html#interface

[Xiang Dong]

May be it is due to gmail security check, I had such experience, using webdriver to search something on google and it finally cause my laptop can't access  google anymore.

--david

---

From: seleniu...@googlegroups.com <seleniu...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Mohammed abdul haseeb <mabdulh...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2016 2:31 PM
To: Selenium Users
Cc: dorothy.b...@gmail.com
Subject: [selenium-users] Re: Selenium webdriver detected by a website ? Bug ?

 

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