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Blania envisions a futuristic world of Orbs of various shapes and sizes, where each person will be given a unique and anonymous code linked to an iris that can be used to log into web hosts and blockchain-based applications.
Blania does not rule out the possibility that Worldcoin will charge a fee for providing this service, but the startup mainly plans to make money through the appreciation of the currency. “You distribute tokens to as many people as possible,” Blania said. Because of that, “the utility of the token increases dramatically” and “the price of the token increases.”
The key to all of this technology is the Orb itself, and the contract that Orb operators sign confirms the company’s focus on stress testing. “Your role is to help us evaluate Orbs and how people interact with them,” the contract said. “You have to think of yourself as a product tester.”
Blania told BuzzFeed News that the company mainly uses field tests to see how the Orbs perform in different environments — from the heat of Kenya to the freezing cold of Norway. “In Kenya there is like, 40-degree heat, and the only shadow in the Orb is something we have never seen here in Germany in the office,” Blenia said.
Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the ambiguity about Worldcoin’s purpose is troubling. “The question is, is this a digital currency company, or is this a data broker?” said. “Anyway, the practice at hand, that pays people for biometrics, is very problematic for privacy and equity.”
“Worldcoin is not a data company and our business model does not include the exploitation or sale of private user data. Worldcoin is only interested in the uniqueness of its users — that is, they have not registered with Worldcoin before – not their identity,” Worldcoin said in a statement.
The company’s efforts to build a database may also violate data privacy and processing laws in Kenya, where the company has extensive operations. Kenya recently passed a data protection law that prohibits companies from sending biometric data abroad without approval from the newly formed Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. Worldcoin currently processes user data in the US, UK, Germany, Japan, and India, according to a data consent form.
Immaculate Kassait, Kenya’s data commissioner, told BuzzFeed News that her office was “not aware” that Worldcoin was collecting Kenyan biometric data and transferring it abroad.
The company has until July 14 to register itself with the commission and submit a detailed Data Protection Impact Assessment under Kenya’s newly enacted data privacy laws, Kassait said by email. Worldcoin told BuzzFeed News that the company will join the Kenyan Data Commission and has conducted a “rigorous” privacy impact assessment.
Bryan Ford, who heads the Decentralized/Distributed Systems (DEDIS) laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and wrote one of the pioneering papers on proof of identity in 2008, said that solving the authentication problem in a way that preserves user privacy would be a significant advance. Ford, however, is not convinced by the Worldcoin solution. The company’s decision to build and store giant, centralized iris databases and iris-hashes, they say, is a massive invasion of user privacy.
“We reject the characterization that collecting images of Worldcoin users is an invasion of privacy: If collecting images of people with their consent is an invasion of privacy, CLEAR” – a biometric identification company – “The UN and Aadhaar will all be examples of invasion of privacy as well,” said Worldcoin in a statement to BuzzFeed News.
Privacy advocates and security experts in India have long considered Aadhaar, India’s massive biometric identification system, a privacy nightmare. Experts also dispute whether Worldcoin has done enough to ensure that it has obtained informed consent from people, given the extensive terms and conditions of the company, privacy policy, and data consent forms in the UK.
“Informed consent means you are in a position to fully understand what is happening,” said Elias Okwara, African policy manager for the advocacy group Access Now, noting that the majority of the Kenyan population speaks Kiswahili. “So directly, it becomes difficult to explain to individuals what data processing means.”
Worldcoin says it will open its privacy forms in six languages and recommends that Orb operators directly translate and explain the company’s extensive policies to non-English speakers. “In all of these local countries, we have Orb operators, and all of their goals and roles are to explain to people what we have agreed to in the local language,” the company said.
Any large biometric database is also vulnerable to hacking, Ford said, explaining that the database could be compromised if someone hacks into the thousands of Orbs that the company plans to distribute. “There’s basically no reliable hardware,” Ford said.
Blania admitted that “there has never been a hardware device that cannot be removed” but said that Worldcoin has created a fraud detection mechanism to identify compromised Orbs.
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