Yeah, the article and this whole comments thread is very intellectually dishonest.
Disclosure: I’m like, 70% optimistic about the project. I don’t believe that the team are lying. Anyway, as with many things, time will tell. I wouldn’t get worked up over it. If it fails it’s pretty inconsequential.
Definitely, it only collected the biometrics of thousands of desperate people into the hands of private people who work with law enforcement agencies everywhere to provide surveillance as a service.
You’re misrepresenting what it’s collecting and you’re part of the problem in this discussion. Worldcoin isn’t storing anything that could be used by any other entity. It doesn’t store biometrics and there isn’t a way to use the store information to know what the iris looked like that generated it.
A hash of a biometric has the exact same negative properties of a biometric data point itself: That it is not concealable, you cannot change it, and that it is tied to you explicitly. Surely you see how a giant database of biometric hashes provides the same usefulness to bad actors as an actual biometric database? It's a unique identifier tied explicitly to your physical body. Anything that hash is tied to can later be trivially de-anonymized.
After collecting everyone's biometric "ID", that database can be helpfully leased to Peter Thiel's (one of the early investors) wonderful surveillance machines, so now when the officer pulls you over "for a broken taillight", their body camera can get a nice view of your iris and buy your entire worldcoin history from say Palentir, for a price of course, and zero warrant.
As I said, you're misunderstanding. The hash can only tell if your iris has been scanned before. It doesn't tie to your identity in any way. And there is no tie between your World ID and the activity on any website that uses an account generated from your World ID, because your wallet makes a new anonymous, private account for each platform.
Thanks for proving my point that virtually all criticisms stem from people misunderstanding or not putting in the effort to learn how it actually works.
>It doesn’t store biometrics and there isn’t a way to use the store information to know what the iris looked like that generated it
You don’t know this for a fact, is it an audited open source project and the security/privacy vouched by some known people in the field? No. It’s just marketing crap
Maybe they are not lying, who knows, but their work can twisted for sure for other unethical results but still legal to do so, after, that team is motivated by money.
Disclosure: I’m like, 70% optimistic about the project. I don’t believe that the team are lying. Anyway, as with many things, time will tell. I wouldn’t get worked up over it. If it fails it’s pretty inconsequential.