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'Verified human': Worldcoin users queue up for iris scans (neuters.de)
79 points by baal80spam on July 25, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 133 comments



Here's EPIC's statement on why Worldcoin is a "potential privacy nightmare":

>Worldcoin is a potential privacy nightmare that offers a biometrics-dependent vision of digital identity and cryptocurrency, and would place Sam Altman’s Tools for Humanity company at the center of digital governance. Worldcoin’s approach creates serious privacy risks by bribing the poorest and most vulnerable people to turn over unchangeable biometrics like iris scans and facial recognition images in exchange for a small payout. Mass collections of biometrics like Worldcoin threaten people’s privacy on a grand scale, both if the company misuses the information it collects, and if that data is stolen. Ultimately, Worldcoin wants to become the default digital ID and a global currency without democratic buy-in at the start, that alone is a compelling reason not to turn over your biometrics, personal information, and geolocation data to a private company. We urge regulatory agencies around the world to closely scrutinize Worldcoin.

https://epic.org/epic-statement-on-privacy-risks-of-worldcoi...


> unchangeable biometrics

Except for, say, glaucoma, detached retinas, injuries, all sorts of stuff that can impact the eyes.

Sorry, you've been involved in a serious accident, you can no longer get your money!


They address this in the whitepaper[0]:

> To validate the quality of the algorithms at scale, their performance was evaluated by collecting 2.5 million pairs of high-resolution infrared iris images from 303 different subjects. These subjects represent diversity across a range of characteristics, including eye color, skin tone, ethnicity, age, presence of makeup and eye disease or defects.

> It is important to note that many health conditions, like cataracts to a certain degree, do not impede iris biometrics. Already today, iris biometrics surpass the inclusivity of other PoP verification alternatives like official IDs since less than 50% of the global population has digitally verifiable identities. However, if the proof of personhood mechanism becomes essential for society, it is important that eventually every single person can verify if they want to. Although not currently established, there could be specialized verification centers to facilitate alternative means of verification for individuals with eye conditions, via e.g. facial biometrics. The introduction of alternative means of verification for World ID could potentially create loopholes.

[0] https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/


Issue is that if I lose my eyes I am suddenly both blind and poor at the exact moment where being poor has the most negative impact


So eyeless people have to jump through extra hurdles that the rest of us don't have to. The Worldcoin grand misvision is that their terrible World ID would be required to get government benefits, and yet makes it harder for some of the people who most need them to get them.


I don't 'believe in' or support Worldcoin, but I don't think it's realistic to expect any one verification system will serve everyone who needs/wants any given service. Government ID, and even governments themselves don't serve everyone in need.


They're talking about using it for things like government benefits.

The moment they opened that can of worms, they're on the hook for making it serve, at the minimum, everyone that the current government mechanisms serve.

I'm using eyeless people as an example here, because it's the obvious case of people who can't possibly use Worldcoin even if they wanted to. The direct implication today is that blind people would lose their benefits under Worldcoin. If that's not true, then either.

1. Government doesn't actually need Worldcoin's ideas as much as Worldcoin hopes they do.

2. There are workarounds that don't require Worldcoin, in which case let's just use those in the first place.


Again, I'm not a Worldcoin supporter, but...

'Blind' is a much larger category than 'eyeless', and I think you're making the implicit assumption that the government's current identity verification methods work much better than they really do. Just look at the HN post yesterday about the woman whose identity was stolen and used to import 'counterfeit' goods. Worldcoin's system may not be perfect, but having it as an option might have helped in a case like that.


Isn't this system supposed to be better than government ID? If it has the same disadvantages, why would anybody use it?


Again, I am not a Worldcoin booster, but I also didn't say it had the same disadvantages. Everything has trade-offs, and Worldcoin has definite advantages against using a small piece of plastic with a bad 2D picture on it.


A government ID is a lot more than that. I have an official ID card that has:

- A bunch of personal identifying data including a unique number (which is as much of a secret as my name or my date of birth)

- A bunch of old-timey security stuff like thumbprint and signature

- An RFID chip containing all this info, ICAO 9303 compliant

- A PIN protected certificate that I can use to sign documents digitally

- Several security measures to make falsifying it very hard

Everybody who lives in this country has one of these, and these features are not uncommon for ID cards to have in other countries. It also has the full backing of the state, which means that if I lose it I can easily get a new one, and is very illegal for somebody to use it to impersonate me, or to create a false one.

I'm not sure what advantages I or my fellow citizens would gain by moving to a distributed system in charge of some foreign capitalists who have never even been to this country.


Id imagine fingerprints will probably be sufficient no? Surely there are other biological identifiers that will serve as a functional replacement?


Maybe, but who knows? The Worldcoin people are making this a problem, so it's up to them to fix it without increasing the burden on people who can't use it as-it.


When did this become a worldwide standard?

There are many cases where those making a problem never fixed anything. In fact too many cases throughout history to enumerate.


Can the blind auto-opt-out of retina scans - I mean, they cannot argue for or against validity of their retina/eye scans in any format.


Isn’t it the same as losing your keys, phone, wallet, passport, etc.?


Is a medical condition the same as carelessness? Probably there is some overlap, but no, they are not the same.


The overlap GP is suggesting is that society has ways for owners who lose their passports and keys to nonetheless keep owning their stuff. Replacing lost passports and keys is slow and inconvenient, but possible.


Yes, basically there is no perfect solution, people are complaining about air at this point.


Good point, and I'm not saying giving control to this random group makes sense, but at the same time, actual governments seem to be completely failing.

The plan that governments have for resolving the geopolitical and economic problems seems to be WWIII. And then things like WorldCoin, but very poorly implemented, and people already distrust the government so much that those ideas never even reach lawmakers since they know they won't be accepted.

The thing is though that humans may not be able to survive without a truly functional international government. And it also has to integrate with technology since that is ubiquitous now.

There just isn't a way to do it without some kind of identification.

Not trying means we will still descend into a cyberpunk dystopia.

And then after hundreds of millions die in WWIII, we would still end up getting our irises scanned. It would just be administered by the superintelligent Chinese police robots. And we would also all have to learn Chinese and would be subjected to the CCP's social credit system.


Not very compelling. How exactly is it a potential privacy nightmare? Which aspect of whose privacy is at risk in what potential situation?


The threat is so broad that giving examples is trivial. One that immediately comes to mind: Imagine science discovers that 99% of people with a certain feature in their iris is likely to develop colon cancer. The discovery leads to insurance companies purchasing iris data from OpenAI behind the scenes. A lot of poor people suddenly would get insurance mysteriously declined, or their policies would include a hidden clause in fine print stating that colon cancer is not covered.


sometimes I forget that most people on HN live in uncivilized countries like the USA

In normal countries that would mean we could save thousands of lives by warning people without even having to test them. Since denying insurance because of some random data from a data broker is completely illegal in any civilized country.


You should stop tilting at windmills about a completely hypothetical example just to get your dunk in on the US like this.


Agreed, there's plenty of real examples one can use, no need to invent new ones.


It’s completely illegal in the US too. Health insurers are extremely limited in the information they can use to price coverage, and in general they can’t outright deny coverage at all.


Awesome, I love it when my questions are trivial to answer.

But I'm not sure how a company such as OpenAI would connect iris data to colon cancer cases. How would they even access iris data? let alone connect iris data to personal identity? I don't see a way of doing that within the Worldcoin framework.

> Your biometric data is first processed locally on the Orb and then permanently deleted. The only data that remains is your IrisCode. This IrisCode is a set of numbers generated by the Orb and is not linked to your wallet or any of your personal information. As a result, it really tells us — and everyone else — nothing about you. All it does is stop you from being able to sign up again.


> As a result, it really tells us — and everyone else — nothing about you. All it does is stop you from being able to sign up again.

Which means it tells them something about you.

What about this scheme prevents identification through somebody scanning your iris to get your hash on the pretext of a legitimate purpose, then connecting your hash to your actual identity and passing it on?

This seems like a large risk, considering how many companies exist entirely to compile data from disparate databases into a single record. The existence of those sorts of businesses is why there is no such thing as an anonymous unique identifier.


How would they go from iris data to World ID (hash)?

Also, World ID is anonymous because the service one uses it with does not recieve the ID, not because they recieve the ID without one's real name. In other worlds, you can sign up to a service using at once both World ID and your real name and they will still have no way of connecting your World ID to your real name.


>Which means it tells them something about you.

Nah, don't think so, that's the point of zero knowledge proofs


Imagine choosing a single password that can’t be changed. Sure, you can’t forget it, but if someone ever discovers it, you’re toast.

The fallback is probably 2FA. But we already use 2FA.


Exactly right. Biometrics are more like usernames than passwords. They are on display for all, and immutable. I should be able to change my password. Ideally username too, but not an expectation most sites hold to.

I'd rather not have my username indelibly linked to my identity. for example, I should be able to delegate to my accountant, or let my kids do stuff on my steam account, etc. Not to mention using an indelible ID that is cross-site, meaning i have to use the same username on all suchlike sites and services. The temptation of having that singular id is so great, it is inevitable it will be known to all — including those corrupt governments who will use it for enhancing their power.

I honestly don't see an upside. Combine this with web attestation and I shudder a bit.


I don't think biometrics are used as usernames or passwords in the Worldcoin system.

I don't think any such data leaves the Orbs, as far as the Worldcoin system in concerned.


Yes, exactly. People keep trying to use them for authentication for some inexplicable reason. They should only be used for identification, if at all.


It should be used as authentication-of-personhood, but not exactly as a username or password.


Authentication of personhood does not require individual identification.

I guess "authentication of unique personhood" would though.


I don't think I would be toast - I can still have a unique password for each account I have.

Also, I can presumably regain possession of my World ID credentials by visiting an Orb.


We must be entering some strange perverted era where "skepticism" is a poisoned, dirty word, because not too long ago this would've been considered an insane proposition to be welcomed in by insane people. I'm inclined to give a layman's diagnosis: A whole generation, maybe two, raised with almost no suspicion of power...except when the conformist narrative permits performative suspicion.


Skepticism has been largely hijacked by those with an anti-democratic or downright reactionary agenda.

A generation raised on “contrarian” and “anti-conformist” YouTube influencers is skeptical of democratic power and international institutions, but willing to give a free pass to billionaires and any other kind of power that operates via ruthlessly deployed private property. Worldcoin fits this mold and so it will find fans.


There's nothing wrong with being skeptical of Democracy, as people have been since Ancient Greece. More recently there's the famous Churchill quote, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."


It's good to be skeptical of how democracy is implemented and executed at any given time. (IMHO Americans in particular should be much more skeptical of their 18th century constitution rather than treat it as scripture.)

It's not good to be knee-jerk skeptical of everything that defined the post-WWII rules-based international system while idolizing billionaire founders and their corporate power. We had some good things figured out by the 1990s. It wasn't the proverbial "end of history" but IMO we need more of the cooperative spirit and respect for human rights that got us there, not less.


>YouTube influencers is skeptical of democratic power and international institutions, but willing to give a free pass to billionaires and any other kind of power that operates via ruthlessly deployed private property.

Because they have temporarily poor millionaire syndrome.


I agree with this observation but it bothers me to no end how eagerly the non-reactionary “mainstream” opinion has let them hijack it. A little bit of skepticism is healthy! This new trend of dismissing every non-conforming opinion is as bad as the conspiracy nut wave it’s trying to fight.

I’m not sure what the solution is but I’m not sure that shutting down every slightly uncommon opinion is it. (I recognize that this comment is exactly what a savvy troll would say and well I guess that’s kinda part of my point)


I'm not sure it's anti-democratic and can think of a few examples:

* Skepticism over mass vaccination (as opposed to at-risk groups only). Shut up, anti-vaxer, you're anti-democratic. Backed by Big Pharma.

* Skepticism over climate change policy (asking middle class to reduce expectations, rather than cranking down on planned obsolescence and offshore production). Shut up, climate denier, you're anti-democratic. Backed by the companies doing offshoring and using climate as selling point.

* Skepticism over affirmative action (as in discriminating people based on skin color in Academia, rather than making it easier for ALL parents to teach things to their kids). Shut up, you racist. Backed by the billion-dollar DEI industry billing enormous rates to public institutions.

I can give many more examples where valid skepticism is immediately conflated with the nearest crazy idea nobody actually cares about (like the actual KKK), and is shut down on that basis by those who have a vested interest in not being scrutinized.


> "Skepticism over mass vaccination"

All successful vaccination is mass vaccination. That's the whole point. Would we be rid of polio if we'd only vaccinated the 5% of population who were most at risk?


Hello, numbers.

Every infection has an R0 rate (average number of people infected by a single infected person). If it's greater than 1, the infection spreads exponentially. If it's lower than 1, it peters out.

Vaccinating X% of people pushes R0 lower by X * N, where N depends on mutation rate, how good is the vaccine at preventing the spread (vs. reducing symptoms), etc.

R0 is also affected by seasonality, immunity from earlier infections, etc.

Polio doesn't mutate as fast, the vaccine lasts long time, and prevents both symptoms and the spread. R0 drops below 1, polio defeated.

COVID mutates much faster, has one of the highest R0 rates among known diseases, vaccine lasts a limited time, considerably reduces mortality rate (which isn't much of a concern for fit healthy adults under 50), and somewhat reduces the spread. It pushes the R0 number somewhat down, but not below 1.

What actually ended the pandemic was the Omicron variant that mysteriously grew much faster in the upper respiratory tract, and got your body to start fighting it before it did anything to the lungs. It still has enough R0, but the symptoms are so mild, it became mostly indistinguishable from common cold, so people stopped caring.

Had we vaccinated the at-risk groups, and given strong incentives for others to lose weight and start exercising, we could have arrived at the same, or lower death toll with much less taxpayer money going towards the Big Pharma.


Always helps to have vaccines that actually work to prevent transmission too.


There clearly are risk factors for paralytic Polio disease but it's likely to be in the very complex interaction between the person's genome and the environment, causing variability in certain types of immune responses. Even now it's not very clear how you would go about testing for them in advance. In the 1950s the "risk group" for a specific serotype of Polio virus is that you were statistically less likely to already have been infected with that serotype. They found out the Salk vaccine was almost entirely ineffective against transmissions pretty quick as well.


"The mainstream media and governments lie and make mistakes, so I am going to mindlessly believe everything this random asshole on YouTube says instead!"


I bet you think that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, too.

There's no "hijacking" occurring except in your mind. Your preferred political tribe also engages in its share of conspiracy-adjacent skepticism.


A whole generation has been asked to take the backseat and just keep themselves busy, while the big guys do serious business. USSR tried that very approach, and you can see in the history books how well it unfolded for them.


<crank warning>

I think having a little bit of slop in a human system is good. A world where your freedoms and responsibilities are entirely managed by computers, like an AWS IAM role for people, sounds awful, and this project seems to want to go there.


Skepticism these days only requires incrementing the number of bots you want to flood your agenda.


And far too many people mistakenly think "skeptical" means "distrustful".


Skepticism has been muddied by right wing conspiracy theorists and now people equate healthy skepticism with mild insanity.


Sometimes we do not look though our eyes, but though lenses of somebody else. Although right wing conspiracy theorists exist, also left wing theorists exist. We should not sat that skepticism is muddied by anybody, because it is muddied by they media that presents their view on they world, which Has muddied our skepticism.


Vaccinated?


This is a 'reasonable response' to the current AI wave by people that subscribe to the Effective Altruism/LessWrong/AI-Doomer mythos.

If AGI is created and then removes the need for any human to work, UBI (or the like) would be essential. You'd want to avoid abuse, so you also need to uniquely verify each person receiving it. I don't think the people involved in this are ignorant to the concerns, they just see it as inevitable based on their ideas about the future.

> The orb was necessary, the website continued, because of Worldcoin’s commitment to fairness: each person should get his or her allotted share of the digital currency—and no more. To ensure there was no double-dipping, the chrome orb would scan participants’ irises and several other biometric data points and then, using a proprietary algorithm that the company was still developing, cryptographically confirm that they were human and unique in Worldcoin’s database.

> “I’ve been very interested in things like universal basic income and what’s going to happen to global wealth redistribution,” Sam Altman, Worldcoin’s cofounder and the former President of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, told Bloomberg, which first reported on the company last summer. Worldcoin was intended, he explained, to answer the question “Is there a way we can use technology to do that at a global scale?”

A common response from Altman when asked about the benefits of AGI is "I think eliminating poverty is good". This is what he's talking about.

Of course, this redistribution doesn't apply to him, early employees, or investors:

> Others took issue with the company’s purported focus on fairness given that 20% of the coins had already been allocated: 10% to Worldcoin’s full-time employees, and another 10% to investors, like Andreessen Horowitz.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...


Every ecoin created lets a small cabal amass the numerous low-hanging fruit before making it publicly available. If any of those ecoins became the World Currency(TM), that small cabal would be the new world elite, having created their immense fortune out of thin air. No ecoin will become trustworthy unless it assures every adopter gets the same initial opportunity.

Satoshi Nakamoto made a compromise by mining a fortune of easy bitcoin, then not touching it. A weak compromise, because the moment they use some of those coins, bitcoin will have one of its greatest crisis of trust.


> You'd want to avoid abuse

Why?

What you're describing is a post-scarcity world. In that context, what does "abuse" even mean?


It's not post-scarcity, it's post-labor. Which is a prerequisite for post-scarcity, but not sufficient. Resources, even allocated optimally by a superintelligence, are still constrained based on the number of people living and the material contained on Earth.

(And, to be clear: I'm sharing their perspective, not mine).


Okay, but in that case "avoiding abuse" is no longer a problem for humans to solve, which is probably good in that it frees up time to try to figure out what to do when the paperclip maximizer no longer demurs from numbering hemoglobin molecules among its accessible resources.


There’s a spectrum of possibilities. What if GPT-10 obviates 80% of jobs and can’t automatically identify every human uniquely? This covers that step in the process.


AGI does not necessarily mean a post-scarcity world right away. You could have AI doing all jobs and doing them better than humans would, but still using finite resources and producing finite products.


I'm not convinced that manufacturing on the scale required for a post-human-labor world to be possible doesn't imply post-scarcity.


Governments already have systems to identify who is a citizen. You can't Sybil attack birth certificates and naturalization paperwork because they're issued by a trustworthy entity[0]. Worldcoin is trying to reinvent ID cards for the sake of... IDK, becoming some kind of ancap alternative to a state bureaucracy?

Also, not everyone is going to accept UBI as a substitute for labor. We already see artists complaining specifically that AI art takes away the fun part of the job. The entire LessWrong/EA memeplex[1] assumes that the benefits of AI will be so obvious that humanity will tolerate the imposition of a new technological priesthood responsible for aligning AI to humanity's collective interests. Worship us and we will make Star Trek a documentary. This is like if you took all the worst parts of Christianity and all the worst parts of authoritarian Soviet Communism and mashed them up in a blender.

[0] Bracing for the inevitable UHM ACKTUALLY comments about ballot stuffing in third world countries

[1] Short for MEME comPLEX. A series of ideas that tend to be adopted together because they are self-reinforcing.


The ideal government would be the ideal partner — unfortunately the governments of the world are far from ideal.

So I can understand why you'd want to circumvent them. But in the end, we do need government, and circumventing them just means eventually needing to re-create them.

Which leads to the question: Do we fix the governments we have, or create new ones?

It seems analagous to the rewrite-from-scratch fallacy. In the end, I can't see any way around fixing the world's governments. Educating the electorate, structural reform, all of it.

So yeah. Currency and UBI seem like functions of governments to me too.


If the need for UBI due to AGI arises then wouldn’t biometric proof of personhood be dead in the water?

Spoofing irises seems well within the realm of a sophisticated AI.


Any sufficiently AI would be under the control of some trustworthy entity. Preferably one. It's too dangerous otherwise.

(I don't agree with this, but it's a common perspective amongst this crowd).


And using biometrics is itself a hack to circumvent the vagaries of government ID systems. So you'd be hacking around a hack.

It makes me think at some point we'll be back to inventing government-issued IDs. Or um using the ones we have.


> If AGI is created and then removes the need for any human to work, UBI (or the like) would be essential.

Only if you think that capitalism and magic generative machines are compatible in any way. The need for UBI would only make sense if only certain classes of individuals can utilize AGI and others need to purchase their produce. How does such a world make sense, and why would anyone want to live in it? If a post-scarcity machine exists, why would tokens of scarcity need to exist - money - alongside it? Sounds like serfdom on easy-mode.


> The need for UBI would only make sense if only certain classes of individuals can utilize AGI and others need to purchase their produce.

This is part of that mindset. The idea of AGI being freely available is horrifying to x-riskers. The idea of it not existing is also just not possible. So they want to see it in the hands of as few people as possible.


UBI and machines doing a lot of work does not mean post-scarcity. UBI is just that - basic; and I don't think anyone believes it will be quick to get to a point where machines have eliminated ALL jobs.


Theres a tweet going around claiming that people are scanning the iris of poor villages and getting the “reward” for themselves.

https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia/status/165906095074878259...

This whole project is creepy and disgusting.


Not dissimilar to when the USSR imploded: the (ex-)komrades were given shares of the company they were working in. Some evil people who then use different means to collect those shares. Apparently at times driving with trucks full of vodka and exchanging the company shares for a pack of bottles of vodka.

The project is creepy but the scammers stealing others from their fair share are just downright evil people.


Eyeball bounties are now a thing. Which country / mercenary group will round them up first to take all the worldcoin? They really should have thought of the implications of creating an incentive market for iris scans.


"What do I (Vitalik Buterin) think about biometric proof of personhood?" - https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html - Has a bunch of alternatives and more thinking about the problem.

On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849277


One of the tech industry’s greatest snake oil peddlers maybe isn’t the right person to look to provide solutions here.


How is Vitalik a "snake oil peddler"?


If Ethereum is a global supercomputer, my miniature dachshund sitting on a copper penny is the dragon Smaug.


As far as I know, he personally isn't responsible/involved with any of the alternative solutions here, he's merely listing them/talking about them to contextualize the conversation further.


> Hackers have installed password-stealing malware on the devices of multiple Worldcoin Orb operators, TechCrunch has learned, giving them full access to the Worldcoin operator dashboard.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/12/hackers-stole-passwords-of...


This thing is going to get exploited to oblivion. They already have a culture to counter feedback. Good luck interfacing with security researchers.


Some previous discussions:

2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30931614

2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998065

2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947468

Don't have any big thought provoking comments other than the fact this makes me feel a bit more sadder :(


> Christian, a 34-year-old graphic designer, said he was taking part because he was "intrigued". He follows developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto, buying cryptocurrencies "just for fun". > >"I think going forward AI will be hard to distinguish from human and I think this potentially solves that problem and that’s pretty amazing," he said, declining to give his full name for privacy reasons.

... Its just me, or it sounds ironic?


I can't wait for people's irises to be redlisted by some organization, permanently locking them out of all services that organization provides.


Cross service bans too. They are actively creating a web of identity connected to the most powerful LLMs. What can go wrong?


"Proof of Personhood" is indeed a critical component of internet infrastructure. In Belgium we have an app for that called "Itsme" and it is becoming more and more the go-to single-sign-on tool. Instead of scanning your iris it asks your bank or government to confirm your identity when you set-up your account. I believe the EU commission is working towards standardising those protocols so apps like Itsme will work EU wide, maybe even worldwide.

As for privacy I don't see a big problem as for most online services I don't want to actually be anonymous towards the service provider, just towards the general web, and the online services should respect that according to the GDPR


Similar system is in place in Italy: https://www.spid.gov.it/en/

Although in classic Italian style now that a solid % of the population has it they’re considering switching to a new, worse, system that relies on the new ID card paired with either an NFC or a card reader.


> In Belgium we have an app for that called "Itsme"

That doesn't sound like proof-of-personhood, it sounds like proof-of-identity.


Itsme identifies you as a person. You can't have multiple accounts. So a Itsme signature is a proof of personhood (in addition to a proof of identity)


Right. All proofs of identity also act as proofs of personhood, but "proof of personhood" isn't the same. You can have a proof of personhood that doesn't identify which exact person you are.


Indeed! I believe Itsme also has the ability to provide anonymised tokens -- to be able to vote online -- but nobody uses it yet


A UBI coin like WorldCoin needs proof-of-identity as well, to prevent duplicate payouts.


It needs to identify an iris, not anything else about the owner of they iris.


That's not really a meaningful difference, though. It's still an identifier unique to you, and as soon as even a single company can correlate that identifier with any of your other identifiers, the game is over. Your iris now directly identifies you.


Did they try to make the scanner look as creepy as possible?


Where do you see a picture of the scanner, I don't see any photos on the submitted link?



It's just missing a pair of electrodes for the users to hold on to - they can sell their thetan levels for a few extra coins.


Honestly I think so, yes.


To give some historical insight into identity, I highly suggest people read:

"Fingerprints:The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science" by Colin Beavan

The overall book is excellent and good balance of the science and history wrapped around an interesting murder case.

The part of the book that felt most apropos to this HN comment thread is this:

In the 1800's there were multiple countries with large populations (by 1800s standards0 where a majority of the population had essentially zero identity documents. This made it trivial for criminals to commit a crime, get caught, move to a different region and commit the exact same crime over and over again.

On the flip side, the book highlights a case where an innocent person is charged with a crime due to a passing resemblance to a criminal. There was no way to prove the innocent person was NOT the criminal and therefore the charge stood.

The goal of bringing this up isn't to say "100% we need digital ID!" but rather to help provide some balance to a discussion on the pros and cons of having "an identity" that is easily verifiable.


To counter-balance... we should realize that if there's a way to 1:1 identify people, then "they" (they is whoever happens to rule over you at any given time, because lord knows we haven't the power to rule our own lives) will require identity even when you don't want to give it.

Sure everything seems nice now, but when they force all to be part of the network, or else, then they have even further control, possibly total control.

So it's not something to tread into lightly. Make sure the means of technological progress is in the hands of the user, not outside powers. This means crypto(graphy)(includes crypto currency, but also DID, etc.), it means running AI locally rather than in the cloud, it means even things as simple as hydroponics in the home and in public spaces.

At the end of the day, technological advancement is a fine line between beneficial progress and absolute tyranny at this stage.


Sam Altman is rapidly climbing the list of villainous rich people.

He seems to be actively working to bring about a very dystopian future in a way that Zuckerberg or Gates never did.


If only we could get ByteDance or Tencent to buy into this. Not that it would improve it, but the CPC association would be the kiss of death.


must be a good reason Apple designed facial scans to be kept inside a device instead of a server.


>Applicants lined up to have their irises scanned by the device, before waiting for the 25 free Worldcoin tokens the company says verified users can claim.

that's a one time payment of 57$

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/worldcoin-org/


In the article, the sentiment from many people is: companies already own my data anyway, so at least I'm getting something this time".

In other words, the malicious actions from data predators (FAANG et al.) and the negligence from governments and regulators to protect the public have led individuals to learned helplessness. It's a dire and depressing situation. The bad guys have won, and people don't have the means or knowledge to fight back. That's why I donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and similar orgs. It's the only way to show the middle finger to the bad guys.


> Worldcoin's data-collection is a "potential privacy nightmare," said the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a U.S. privacy campaigner.

> Ali, a 22-year-old chemical engineering student... (...) "I told my brother about it this morning. I told him 'it's free money, you want to come with me to get it?'"

I wonder what you can get people to do with the promise of money? Could you have them play Russian roulette? How many people would accept? If there was a way to make it seem real and convincing (without being real of course!) it would be a fascinating experiment.


I'm sure Sam Altman can't stop laughing because people willingly give their privacy to a venture company they don't really understand, just to issue a virtual currency that's worth a couple of bucks.


Exactly. A government or a three letter agency would find it difficult to do just that and will quickly run into lots of trust issues.

Now with Worldcoin, Sam is selling the solution (proof-of-personhood) to the problem he created with ChatGPT (AI spam, deep fakes, etc) and could be easily working with those same governments who would have always wanted to get people to sleep-walk into handing over their digital identity.

The main difference? Worldcoin is doing it all out in the open.

Sam is actually worse than Zuckerberg.


Just for context, does WorldCoin actually save your iris information somewhere, or are the scans just a one time thing to generate your WorldId? The thought of iris scanning is slightly creepy, but I'm curious ...


Doesn't leave the Orb, and is deleted immediately.


This one in particular makes me feel like I've woken up in a dystopia.


Putting aside the insanity of people lining up to be cataloged by a private company, what's to stop someone from scanning the eyeballs of a dog?

And how does this work if you only have one eye?


Handful of comments on 2022 article, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36850993


Who would have thought that "apocalyptic science fiction author" would be included in the professions made obsolete by tech?


I see some comments talking about how proof of personhood is necessary, however the way that Worldcoin does it leaves a gap between the cryptographic proof keys and the identity.

TL;DR there isn’t a way to connect biometrics to key pairs unless the key pairs are generated using biometrics (very insecure) or the orb attests that they are unique from a hardware signature to Worldcoin (which means Worldcoin is a central issuer of identity and controls global identity).

If you want to read more I wrote on HN a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35457769

There must be another way.


Presumably, the reason they want you to show up in person to one of their "orbs", is to stop people from submitting generated biometrics to extract the free money.

But, if I already have someone's biometrics for some other purpose, I presume I can use that to pretend to be them? It just seems like an inconvenient password you can't change.


This is exactly how to trick the masses into a new system like Worldcoin. Give them that free money and take their digital identity from them. A leaf out of China's digital Yuan CBDC rollout. [0]

Governments are now taking notes on how to perform a perfect rollout of a CBDC without alarming the masses with its dystopian drawbacks or the so-called 'conspiracy theorists' discovering their plans and leaking it before it launches.

Given that Worldcoin was essentially out there in the open, it was already too late to even begin to stop them. Especially when Sam Altman has been talking to governments about both creating the poison (ChatGPT/AI fakes) and selling the cure / solution (Worldcoin).

You are watching the creation of another 'personhood' data broker / collector using an Orb to verify / KYC people and give them free money. Something that would make governments and three letter agencies incredibly jealous.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/china-uses-digita...


And here I am thinking the Toyota app for my new minivan was asking for too much. I hate the direction tech is going.


Tech isn't going anywhere. This is just a rich guy on Twitter sharing his pyramid scheme. It will be forgotten in a week just like it was forgotten when it launched years ago.


Create the problem (AI-assisted spam), sell the solution (centralized identity verification)


If they really cared about the spam, wouldn't they crack down internally on use of bots for manipulation? To my knowledge no ToS or internal rules against this type of deception exist.


That would make Sam Altman one of the most powerful humans in history. Technical problems aside, what has he done to deserve this trust?


I prefer my cyberpunk dystopia to remain fiction. I'm starting to suspect Sam Altman is a closet accelerationist.


This garbage? Thought we all decided to ignore this back in the NFT daze a year, nay, two years ago.


what if I scan eye picture, or CGI eye animation, or high quality photo of someone else's eye?


"It's free money!" People are insane. We're just giving everything away.


looking forward to a rise in crime where the victim had his eyes removed.


obligatory scene from Demolition Man:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7R_FF5O1d4


I am reminded that $5 cash for signing up was how PayPay quickly scaled. Beneficial knock-on effects to society from that were: reusable rockets, satellite internet, electric cars, and the death of Twitter.


Nothing creepy about this....




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