I don't know why WorldCoin specifically wanted specifically iris scans, but I know that companies frequently toe the line when it comes to the law, and step over it if the fines are small enough, and that they're data-hungry. Facebook + Cambridge Analytica + election eruption. Github + Copilot. Stable Diffusion + "AI art". LLM + Reddit and other websites making moves towards a closed internet to avoid scraping. Just because the data collection wasn't valuable at the time it was collected, doesn't mean it didn't become so after a critical threshold. These trends monetarily benefit a few people, and the rest of us get enshittification.

Just because iris data may not be valuable today, doesn't mean it won't be insanely valuable in the future, but it does practically guarantee that benefits won't be shared equitably. Remember Henrietta Lacks? Her family only just reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher this month. How much money does TFS make, how much are HeLa cells worth, and how much did the Lacks estate end up getting?

If iris scans are so irrelevant, then why did WorldCoin flat out ignore Kenya's order to stop collecting that information for months? Shouldn't a bunch of geniuses work there - they could make their code compliant if they wanted to. So why did they keep collecting?