Your edit is spot on. Google is trying to annoy people out of using VPNs and other tracking blockers. In most cases, I allow one CAPTCHA, and if that fails, I go somewhere else. If it's Google search, where I go next is Bing, just to punish Google.

When I must use Google, I do so in a dedicated container on Firefox. That way, Google knows who I am, but the only thing they ever get is what traffic I'm sending to them.

One thing I have yet to do is randomize my VPN exit node for Google; I've noticed that they correlate exit nodes to device trackers, and if I visit somewhere outside of my Google container, they can tell it's me by correlation. I may start using Firefox's VPN for Google connections, or just fire up Tor for Google connections.

This sounds like what TOR users run into. Are you always clearing your browsing data/cookies in Firefox? A fairly blank slate there will raise some red flags in a lot of systems causing the captchas to be aggressive.

Otherwise, maybe you just ended up with a bad IP address that was previously being used for suspicious bot looking traffic?

I would definitely submit a ticket to Etsy about this issue, but this is likely an issue with captcha or whatever they're using to detect "suspicious activity".

Edit: I just tried logging in to Etsy and it gave me about 4 captchas for signing in with a "new device".

Looks like google really needs help training their self driving cars.

well, no offense, but what else do you expect, if you don't select the tile that includes 1px of the motorbike that's part ofthe surrounding tiles? get over it, man!

/s

Wiggle your mouse a bit before you select something, they check mouse movements and if it’s too precise you fail

Change you browsers user-agent(set to chrome on windows), clear cookies & disconnect router for 1 min. Then try again. Let me know if it works 😀

For me, it seems commonly related to anti-fingerprinting extensions, or settings in Librewolf

I think this is simply because ai has now reached a dumb humans level of solving captchas and now a statistical analysis of success rate is the only way to tell the difference. Those of us who try and avoid trackers are going to be completely fucked when humans are worse at I'm not a robot that a robot. What the fuck are we going to do?

Are you using a VPN? If yes, try disabling it.

EDIT (2024-05-22T19:33Z): For clarity, I'm not against the use of VPNs. I am simply offering ideas for troubleshooting steps. It is very common that sites and services will flag VPN providers as potential botnets and, thus, barrage a VPN user with captchas. This outcome isn't unique to VPNs — there are potential browsing fingerprints that can result in being flagged as a potential bot — but it is at least one potential and common culprit.