Worldcoin: Sam Altman launches eyeball scanning crypto coin
“According to the company most sign ups have happened in Europe, India and southern Africa.”
What differentiates WorldCoin from many existing cryptocurrency projects is its use of biometrics. Its unique method of sign-up, involving scanning of irises, rang alarm bells in France, Germany and Kenya. India has at least 17 sign-up locations.
Seems that they have set up these scanning centers inside/near several Delhi metro stations. An office colleague was telling me about it, managed to talk him out of it. You receive 15 worldcoins or so when you sign up for the orb scan.
Concerns are raised by countries like Kenya where this activity is suspended.
Strangest thing is when they are linked with such sensitive and powerful products like OpenAI, why and how such information will be used / abused.
To think promoters of such a powerful company with stakes involving every aspect of human life in future will use information like this for crypto scam alone does not look interesting.
I think the crypto-currency part of it is just to lure people & get their consent for data collection. There probably are easier ways to do such scams without going through legal & PR trouble of such alarming data collection.
If they have developed a model to make use of such data, they could develop a tool that verifies whether or not something is human and run it as a subscription service, much like ChatGPT. But, much like ChatGPT, acquisition and usage of the data required to develop such tool is unregulated as of yet.