Kenyans line up to get their irises scanned by Worldcoin, YouTube screenshot, KTN News, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP3rQU0umwY&t=475s
Videos of people lining up around the world for iris scans went viral after the parent of Chat GPT rolled out its latest human ID project, Worldcoin, which involves gathering biometric data in 20 countries in exchange for some cryptocurrency tokens worth around $2.31 each.
Based in San Francisco and Berlin, Worldcoin is a private company backed by venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz and Global Coin Research, a venture capital collective.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, kicked off Worldcoin by scanning eyeballs in 35 cities.
The iris-scanning technology is done by a bowling ball-sized chrome device called “the Orb” that can recognize that you are a human and not a robot. The goal is to issue you a digital passport called a “World ID” that lets you access your share of the economic growth produced by a society in which robots do all the hard work.
The idea or the hype is that developers will be able to build multiple applications that may one day form the basis of a new digital economy using Worldcoin as the distributor of universal basic income.
Worldcoin hopes to sign up 2 billion users. So far, 2 million-plus have signed up since the July 24 launch. Comparably, ChatGPT surpassed 1 million users in its first five days after its Nov. 30 launch, and had 173 million users in April 2023.
“It’s Worldcoin’s philosophy that the best way to produce unique verifiable humanness is through human biometrics that map to our unique DNA,” the company website says.
“As someone who doesn’t even use FaceID on an iPhone and takes the time to reject all cookies on every single website, the idea of getting my iris scanned by a sci-fi looking shiny sphere was daunting to say the least,” journalist Eliza Gkritsi wrote for Coindesk. Gkritsi has his iris scanned in France.
Likewise, another journalist, Tabby Kinder, had her iris scanned in London by Worldcoin and wrote about it for Financial Times. The experience, she said, left her with more questions than answers and doubts over the serious challenges facing the endeavor.
The Worldcoin mission is contradictory, Kinder wrote. Digital currencies were created to reject centralized finance and stop governments and corporations from having total control of personal data– “an aim that seems ideologically opposite to Worldcoin’s goal of uniting citizens and their governments through its crypto token.”
Another problem is that Worldcoin is not available in the U.S., where regulation is expected to become far stricter after the FTX collapse and uncertainty persists over crypto assets as securities.
Then there are unaddressed privacy concerns. Worldcoin says it converts scans to code before deleting the raw data but not much information is available on how this works. “in this project. “Imagine a world where criminals use biometric data leaks to steal identities rather than credit card details,” Kinder wrote.
“I left my three-minute appointment with no more clarity regarding what my iris data would be used for, and convinced of a far more simple roadblock to the company’s success: most people won’t care enough to sign up.”
Admittedly, The process of getting his irises scanned was glitchy but smoother and less intimidating than he expected, Gkritsi wrote for Coindesk.
Aside from the images of people lining up to hand over their biometrics, Kinder predicted that fans, journalists and the curious won’t make for the sort of numbers Worldcoin is looking for.
“Worldcoin is already under scrutiny for the way it incentivizes participants in developing countries, where it has offered people free cash and gifts such as AirPods in exchange for a scan. That scrutiny will increase,” Kinder wrote.
