I can specify a custom profile to use, so I simply passed in my own firefox profile stored in APPDATA/roaming/mozilla/profiles. Selenium by default creates a new profile, so it has no cookies or browsing history.
I decided to launch firefox using this piece of java code WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(new FirefoxProfile()) I then became curious what was the difference between me launching firefox through the executable, and me launching firefox through selenium.
I started up a regular instance of firefox (that is, without selenium), went to the website, clicked the checkbox, and it determined that I was a human and let me go. Recently the website changed their login system by adding google's reCAPTCHA, and everytime I try to click the checkbox, google determines that I am a bot and asks me to select a bunch of images. I use selenium to start up firefox and log onto a website to scrape some data a few times a day.
Preface: my goal is not to solve captcha using automation tools, but to attempt to understand why a browser that is being launched by selenium is being identified as a bot in the first place, and how selenium contributes to this.