World coin collecting biometrics of Kenyans
Buzzfeed did a great job investigating this in May this year. They quoted
the data commissioner in this article that’s worth reading.
www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems
Regards.
Linda Bonyo
On Tue, 15 Nov 2022 at 18:25, Mwendwa Kivuva via KICTANet <
kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:
> Have you heard of World Coin? What is the value of your iris scan? World
> Coin scans the iris of the public in exchange of the WorldCoin
> cryptocurrency. I came across them at Sarit Center today. Is this legal?
> Has Kenyan government and Office of the Data Protection Commissioner given
> then the go ahead to mass scan the biometrics of Kenyans?
>
> According to the project’s team, around 30 orbs that can scan people’s
> eyes and create a unique identifier are located all across the world.
> Worldcoin orbs can be found in France, Sudan, Indonesia, Kenya, and Chile.
> Worldcoin’s orbs are maintained by “Orb Operators” who get rewarded for
> soliciting potential Worldcoin participants. Depending on when the person
> got in on the project, token recipients can get between $10 and $200 worth
> of the digital asset worldcoin (WC).
>
> The popular whistleblower Edward Snowden scorned Sam Altman’s Worldcoin
> intro tweet as well. “This looks like it produces a global (hash) database
> of people’s iris scans (for ‘fairness’), and waves away the implications by
> saying ‘we deleted the scans,’” Snowden said. “Yeah, but you save the
> *hashes* produced by the scans. Hashes that match *future* scans. Don’t
> catalogue eyeballs,” Snowden added.
>
>
> news.bitcoin.com/iris-scanning-worldcoin-idea-fuels-objections-from-privacy-advocates-snowden-says-dont-catalog-eyeballs/
>
>
