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Kenya suspends Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning crypto project
- tmpz22 3y ago> Kenyans received 25 worldcoins — amounting to around 7,100 Kenyan shillings (about $50) > Worldcoin says over 2 million people have already signed up > Rest of World also notes that “relatively few people were familiar with the goals of the project” and were instead looking to get the $50 reward. Some key notes. Im actually fine with this as long as they're a startup with robust security processes/audits AND acknowledge the impact giving away free money has on the efficacy of their early user numbers.
- jacquesm 3y agoI'm not ok with scamming people in 3rd world countries.
- Eumenes 3y agoI was appalled to see that most of the orb locations were NOT in western nations. This is an obvious attempt to collect biometric/human data for training purposes, by taking advantage of populations of developing nations, by giving them fake money.
- jacquesm 3y agoExactly, you have to be a certain level of cynical to be able to even suggest such a thing. It's a new form of colonial abuse, not unlike the way low value goods were exchanged with native peoples the world over in return for very high value goods or even their lives.
- Eumenes 3y agoYou can even take it a step further because you can sign up to be a "Worldcoin Orb Operator" and help facilitate the entire process against your fellow countrymen. Honestly I was impressed with how brazen this entire thing is - they might have well just paid for eyeball scans and cut the crypto crap.
- TeeWEE 3y agoWhat is exactly bad here? The eyeballs photos are not stored unless you agree with it. It’s just hashed and stored in the system. It’s just a hash of eyeballs to allow checking who is human and who is not. It doesn’t store any personal data. Did you read the whitepaper?
- code-blooded 3y agoScans of eyeballs were stored for training / algorithm improvement purposes during the beta phase rollout.
- sangnoir 3y ago> This is an obvious attempt to collect biometric/human data for training purposes Dream bigger! This biometric information is valuable, it can be sold or licensed to (current or future) identity companies, or included as part of a Palantir/Anduril/$Tolkien_Noun border security or intelligence services sold to governments all over the world. I'm sure the CIA & secret-police-types would love getting access to this data once they have a larger dataset (6 to 7 digits)
- lowkey 3y ago[flagged]
- lawn 3y agoOneCoin was also targeting people in 3rd world countries to a large extent. The people with the lowest morals always seem to target the weakest, targeting older people is another common target for these scammers.
- onesphere 3y agoTo me, SSN is enough to personally identify. Additional information would be redundant for that purpose. Of course, if any information is misused, that’s illegal. And it’s not a lot of money for them to steal back, unless it’s about labor control. But again, that’s illegal. In the US, what incorporates the existence of federal government power is that there is somebody to mandate it, and this is represented by capital/property/enforcement/vote. Those that are enfranchised with property (like money) are legally recognized as invested in upholding the agreement of union: then the law, and hence their stake, survives. You’re trusted to do business, run for office, make new laws, etc. You can make systems that persist or harden the fairness of a law. By enfranchising people worldwide, you’re giving them a stake. Enforcement, however, is the hard part. Is this coin rigorous enough? Is it stable? What’s the jurisdiction?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jrm4 3y agoGood, because this is an awful and stupid and terrible and ridiculous and exploitative idea. On its no-pun-intended face. Let's be clear, it does not matter at ALL if Sam Altman or anyone presently involved has good intentions; the goal is biometric crypto, and biometrics -- which is to say, unalienable IDs, is by default an awful idea and should probably be dismissed outright.
- dcsommer 3y agoWhy are unalienable IDs an awful idea? Unalienable IDs seem to me to be the "default" of human societies. Before technology, everyone had "unalienable IDs" -- if you saw Bob, it was Bob.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 3y agoOr Bob's twin brother. Or someone that really looked like Bob.
- afavour 3y agoI'm always skeptical of "before technology" comparison because they rarely account for the radical differences of the world today, like scale. But in this case the comparison doesn't really work. If Bob went to a new town he could introduce himself as Dave and no-one would be any the wiser. By comparison eyeball scans are owned by a private company, infinitely replicable and reusable. They could follow you absolutely everywhere you go without your permission.
- joe_the_user 3y agoAlso, biometrics aren't like people recognizing each other. They eventually have to be become data sent over a network so they're basically a password/id designed/assumed to not be alterable or spoofable - but that assumption is generally false. Hacking can happen from anything from someone getting private info to someone walking around with a mask. And here, as mentioned, there's no password resets available.
- walrus01 3y agoSerious concerns were raised about this more than two years ago: https://www.vox.com/recode/22557715/worldcoin-sam-altman-cryptocurency-orb-eye-scanning-iris-biometrics-privacy-concern https://www.vox.com/recode/22557715/worldcoin-sam-altman-cry... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wants-to-scan-your-eyes-in-exchange-for-crypto.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wants-...
- lancesells 3y agoGet your eyeballs scanned for some made-up money. Does it also come with an NFT of your eyescan? This sounds like something that should have happened in 2020/21.
- walrus01 3y agoFor strictly satirical purposes, I'd like to get a copy of the Worldcoin pitch deck and do a bulk search/replace for eyeball scanning with scrotum vein pattern scanning, and re-publish it.
- CrazyPyroLinux 3y agoSackCoin, NutCoin, DEEZ
- walrus01 3y agoScroteChain
- Scoundreller 3y agoThat’s sexist. Why no boob vein scan?
- walrus01 3y agoI know somebody that successfully registered a nipple for an android phone unlock behind-the-screen fingerprint scanner, does that count?
- landemva 3y agoWhat's stopping you?
- walrus01 3y agoNobody has given me a copy of their pitch deck yet
- rhuru 3y agoSuch great loss for the worldcoin I am sure.
- LispSporks22 3y agoOctober 2021, > The company has so far amassed over 100,000 users globally already, and aims to hit the 1 billion user milestone by 2023. August 2023, > Worldcoin says over 2 million people have already signed up
- tommiegannert 3y agoSources, for posterity: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wants-to-scan-your-eyes-in-exchange-for-crypto.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wants-... https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/2/23817147/kenya-worldcoin-suspended-sam-altman-eyeball-scanning https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/2/23817147/kenya-worldcoin-s...
- LispSporks22 3y agoI'm kinda morbidly curious about things in general, so here's my question: Can I cut someone's eye ball out and use it to collect their money, or does Worldcoin use some kind of 2FA like my phone?
- walrus01 3y agoI see someone else remembers the eyeball authentication scene in this well known movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/
- fnoof 3y agoThe orb does a round of “liveness” checks before the retina imaging to ensure someone’s not trying to scan their dog / detached eyeball.
- mrguyorama 3y agoYC alums are looking a lot like Forbes 30 under 30
- anotherhue 3y agoHow is this better than just using SIM identities? If we want a way to digitally transact quickly, cheaply, for 'walking around money' levels, then a simple disposable wallet baked into the SIM is a trivial way to go. Remember a SIM is basically a HSM. It of course, already exists, and is very successful in Africa. But SV innovators don't have a piece of it so better make up some BS and drown out any practical voice with media click-bait about eyeballs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
- Scoundreller 3y agoAnd a SIM is just a smaller iso7816 smart card. Never understood why Visa and Mastercard (or its members) never turned on the stored value (“offline credit”) portions of the spec. Plenty of retailers that just “go dark” when the payment/telco network goes down. But maybe that’s an IT issue/decision. (At least that’s how I think it works: the card keeps track of how many unsigned offline transactions have happened and eventually says “no more” until it gets a ping back from the payment network)
- mysterydip 3y agoI just heard about this on Bloomberg last night. When asked about security issues, the worldcoin spokesman basically said "everything has some risk, and we'll help them get the tools they need" without actually addressing the elephant in the room.
- topper-123 3y agoCan someone explain how cheating is avoided is this setup? Can’t people just give fake biometric data to this system?
- lawn 3y agoIt's centralized.
- derekdahmer 3y agoPart of their orb tech is a ton of sensors that make sure its a real eyeball on a human.
- penguin_booze 3y agoWondering whether to let grifters milk your country? It's quite simple: ban straight away, and don't look back.
- paganel 3y agoMost probably the Kenyan authorities saw the writing on the wall when it came to the West’s polices in Africa, see what’s happening now in Niger. Good for them. I had personally no idea that any of Altman’s companies was involved in dystopian stuff like this, but it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, as I’ve said before and I’ll say it again that from my point of view Altman (and guys like him) are merely frontmen for 3-letter US security agencies.
- cycrutchfield 3y agoMilitary coups are good now?
- paganel 3y agoIf they get rid of some detrimental external forces they might be good, yes. Anything that keeps persons/organisations like Samantha Power and USAID out of a specific country has very big chances of being a good thing. [1] https://www.usaid.gov/niger https://www.usaid.gov/niger
- cycrutchfield 3y agoGot it. So replace USAID with Wagner. Makes total sense.
- whatshisface 3y ago>Despite this, Worldcoin maintains that “biometric data never leaves the orb” and is “permanently deleted” after you sign up. The company instead saves your IrisCode — a unique set of numbers that represents your identity. "We don't store your biometric data, just a number in one-to-one correspondence with it that anyone with access to our algorithm could reproduce..."
- TeeWEE 3y agoIt’s a one way hash function. So no, you can’t. Only if you have somebodies eyeball (alive) you could generate the hash and check if it’s stored in worldcoin
- whatshisface 3y agoYes, anyone could reproduce the hash.
- drc500free 3y agoDaugman's IrisCode is not a one-way hash. It's basically a topologically flattened, cropped, fourier transform. The biometrics industry has been claiming that templates are one-way hashes for decades, and they still aren't. Converting an image to a template requires similar images to result in similar templates. That's usually the opposite of what you want from a hash. There is a concept of "biometric hashing" that would accomplish the one-way claim, but it's theoretically hard and as far as I know none have hit the accuracy levels to make the biometric part feasible for a large scale systems.[1] The real claim biometrics vendors tend to make if you push them is that you can't reconstruct a photo-realistic image of the face / finger / iris from the template. Which is generally not a true claim either, but at least would require some work with generative tech. And a photorealistic image that generates the same template is likely to look a lot like the actual person. Source - 10 years of consulting in biometrics for government, academia, and industry, including spoofing and vulnerability assessments. Most people in the industry don't know what they are talking about and just repeat marketing claims. [1]https://www.cse.unr.edu/~bebis/CS790Q/PaperPresentations/BiometricEncryption.pdf https://www.cse.unr.edu/~bebis/CS790Q/PaperPresentations/Bio...
- TeeWEE 3y agoEverybody is so negative about it. It don’t see why. It’s just storing a hash of an eyeball to have a better solution than soon-to-be-broken captchas to detect humanness. The only thing that is stored is the hash. It’s just a “human or not” database
- TeeWEE 3y agoAnd wat better than SSN managed by a government you must trust. For one it’s not worldwide. Secondly you can’t trust them.
- hightrix 3y agoAre you suggesting that we should use this or technology like it to simply be able to login to a website? That’s a whole hearted no thank you from me. I should not be required to scan my retina just to login to my email.
- psd1 3y agodrc500free states that it's not a hash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36978211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36978211 Are you possibly mixing your eviltech? WEI is the replacement for captcha. This is the replacement for identity providers.
- ulfw 3y agoAfter Loopt, that's the second thing from Sam that makes no sense whatsoever.
- daniel-cussen 3y ago[dead]
- thedrbrian 3y agoRug pull when?