Worldcoin, a controversial biometric cryptocurrency and digital ID project founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, works using biometric data contained in people’s irises and also operates something called World ID – a digital way to prove someone’s identity.
Now, the idea is – despite a rising number of questions and misgivings about the platform, specifically about the privacy protections (or alleged lack thereof) and whether some categories of people are taken advantage of in some situations – to extend the use of the global digital ID system to social welfare users.
Worldcoin continues to maintain and reiterate that the reason for its existence is to help create more equal opportunities in the world, and apparently, one (if not the necessary, from their point of view) way to do it is to contribute to “building the world’s largest identity and financial network, along with infrastructure that gives access and ownership to everyone.”
With the good intentions declared and out of the way, let’s move on to – the socially vulnerable people. One of the envisaged applications of Worldcoin is to create a public infrastructure that will serve as “proof of personhood.”
How Worldcoin got from scanning people’s irises, to allegedly looking out for their well-being is by using fraud as an example of how, in current systems, its perpetrators can use fake identities “to acquire more than their fair share of the resources allocated by social benefit programs.”
This possibility apparently has no solution less invasive and “problematic” in privacy terms than collecting biometric data from people’s eyeballs (it goes without saying, only to their own benefit – says Worldcoin.)
Without citing sources or methodology allowing it to arrive at this conclusion, a post on Worldcoin’s website claims that India managed to save more than half a billion dollars worth of social welfare and subsidies by using a biometric data-based anti-fraud system.
In Worldcoin’s opinion, there is no reason whatsoever to stop in India – while insisting that World ID is “decentralized proof of personhood” as if that alone guarantees it is a safe scheme, a recommendation is made to consider implementing it “to any project or organization globally.”
A nebulous reference about what could happen, in case AI advances as they hope it would, is made concerning “counteracting the concentration of economic power.”
And now that you’ve heard all the positive things you wanted to hear – Worldcoin would clearly hope you wouldn’t mind giving them the biometric data from your eyes, too.
