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Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
- archibaldJ 3y ago> In Transparency International's 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index, Kenya scored 32 on a scale from 0 ("highly corrupt") to 100 ("very clean"). When ranked by score, Kenya ranked 123rd among the 180 countries in the Index, where the country ranked first is perceived to have the most honest public sector. > Despite market reforms, several business surveys reveal that business corruption is still widespread and that companies frequently encounter demands for bribes and informal payments to 'get things done' in Kenya, a trend that has contributed to an increased cost of doing business in Kenya. The country ranks 56 among 190 economies globally on World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index 2019. > The public procurement sector in Kenya suffers widespread corruption and is the leading form of graft in the public service and always at the centre of all major corruption scandals. The use of agents to facilitate business operations and transactions in Kenya is widespread and poses a risk for companies, particularly at the market entry and business start-up stage. It's cute on HN everyone is bashing Worldcoin while there is not a single discourse in regards to gov regulation and the business environment in Kenya and how it may (or may not) be relevant in this case(?) I knew a few kenyans personally many years back (who were working in Mainland China and Hong Kong) and they were clearly not big fans of the kenyan gov. I wonder if there are improvement in the recent years.
- lazzlazzlazz 3y agoI wonder what proportion of people in the comments section here use Clear, which stores biometric data in a centralized database (unlike Worldcoin, which instead uses cryptography to avoid storing anything unnecessary, and never stores biometric data).
- DropInIn 3y agoI can't believe people willingly sign up for what is clearly a fascists/totalitarians wet dream.... You could offer me a million dollars and I wouldn't hesitate sith my "no", and I'm far from wealthy.
- gmerc 3y agoUsing developing countries to build “social proof” in terms of user numbers while not even registering a company and surely not paying taxes. What do we call this, dystopian tech neo-colonialism?
- tim333 3y agoMy last trip to Kenya I got stopped by the police at the airport for a bribe for some stupid made up stuff. I expect this is mostly a shake down for bribe money. I'm also a happy WorldCoin user. I think a lot of people who want it shut down are kind of miseries that don't like seeing other stuff being successful.
- maxslch 3y agoEven if they have a database, what can they use it for? scanning eyes isn't a simple operation, you can't scan with a smartphone etc. How can it possibly be used or sold to?
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- rinze 3y agoThis is good for Bitcoin.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- danpalmer 3y agoWhy would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny – whether that's market scrutiny from the SEC/etc or privacy scrutiny under GDPR and other legislation well understood by SV lawyers. Good on Kenya for holding Worldcoin to account. It'll be interesting to see what they do as they enter the "and find out" phase.
- frozenport 3y agoAlso a bribe. I could imagine the poor would be more willing to waste their time getting their eyes scanned.
- Alex3917 3y ago> Why would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny Iris scanning is already widely used in the U.S. and hasn't received much scrutiny. It's in the news all the time, e.g. with the owners of Madison Square Garden using it to keep their political enemies from going to concerts. You probably use it every time you get on an airplane already. Even LinkedIn uses CLEAR to power their verified profiles.
- gowld 3y agoMy iris is scanned on an airplane? If so, it's not being disclosed to me.
- tristor 3y agoThey're probably referring to the optional facial recognition based boarding systems that many airports in the US are rolling out, primarily for international flights. It uses facial recognition to match you to your passport photo based on the documents verified during check-in, to ensure the person boarding the flight is the same person who checked-in when their documents were manually verified and recorded in the computer system. You can still hand your passport and boarding pass to the gate agent, it's not required to do facial recognition boarding if you don't want to, and at any rate it's not doing an iris scan, it's using a standard facial dotmap to match to a photo. It's not even doing 3D mapping, because it's source material is a standard passport photo.
- throwanem 3y agoInteresting, especially in conjunction with an apparent global outage: https://www.forbes.com/sites/segunolakoyenikan/2023/08/07/sam-altmans-worldcoin-app-goes-offline-limiting-users-access-to-wallets/?sh=401e6c026cb9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/segunolakoyenikan/2023/08/07/sa...
- 93po 3y agoThe outage was only specific information in the app, and only for the first 24 hours after launch. Everything else operated fine.
- AlphaWeaver 3y agoWill the Kenyan government now have access to the biometric data collected by Worldcoin?
- MBCook 3y agoJust how bad this is would depend on how they stored the data, I guess. Why does it feel like they probably keep WAY more data than they need instead of just the hash? Glad they’ve been shut down at least.
- danpalmer 3y agoI bet there's a really well understood data store that contains minimal data and meets various anonymity proofs. And then a tag-manager implementation with MixPanel, Intercom, Amplitude, Heap, FullStory, and Segment, all receiving every interaction with a full JSON object describing the current state of the application and user.
- tristor 3y agoUgh. This is probably the true nature of the thing, it's shocking how this happens at nearly every company I've been at. Eng is super concerned with privacy and security, and then as soon as Marketing gets a hold of it, it's all coated in 6 layers of analytics for funnel tracking leads.
- danpalmer 3y agoI need to write a blog post about the time an ad network told me that their required integration was to integrate their JS bundle that would send all text input to their servers. When I told them No Fucking Way (in not that many more words), they said they would need to get executive sign-off on a "custom" integration. The "custom" bit being us doing everything ourselves server-side and sending them a single opaque identifier for conversions.
- uLogMicheal 3y agoThey "securely" store the iris codes so that their machines can check for duplicates. They have the database even if the crypto crashes.
- realusername 3y ago> It has also launched in various countries including Indonesia, France Japan, Germany, Spain and the UK. Data watchdogs in some countries have already said they are examining Worldcoin. I don't know about Indonesia but that's not going to fly in the other countries of this list either. Especially not in very privacy-oriented EU members.
- borissk 3y agoThere are huge queues at their two UK scanners (both in London).
- password54321 3y agoI wouldn't put too much faith in them. The cookie law is a joke and the UK government is trying to get access to everyone's encrypted messages.
- uLogMicheal 3y agoThis project builds a global identity database even if the crypto part disappears. Their tokenomics are a mess and their CEO openly admitted to market manipulation recently. Good on Kenya for shutting this down, I hope many more follow.
- 93po 3y agoIt doesn't create or track identities. It creates a unique hash of your iris and can only use it to determine if your iris has been scanned before. Nothing else.
- choppaface 3y agoAnd Loopt was originally about just sharing your location privately and then oops that got sold for low income credit card targeting so that sama could cash out https://allthingsd.com/20120309/green-dot-buys-location-app-loopt-for-43-4m/ https://allthingsd.com/20120309/green-dot-buys-location-app-...
- 93po 3y agoOrbs will be open sourced and audited. Long-term they aren't storing anything other than the iris hash.
- dopidopHN 3y agoYou can opt in for storage of the iris image itself to ensure that further modification of the hash algorithm do not force you to re-scan you eye.
- choppaface 3y agoBut then your actual biometrics can get taken by the government, as illustrated in OP raid on warehouses. Or Worldcoin leadership could use your biometrics for whatever they want e.g. stalking as done at Uber or forking their coin to fund a new ICO.
- progrus 3y agoHalf-baked effort to hypnotize the global south. A GPT would be presented as the totalitarian “superintelligence”, and non-native speakers would have a hard time challenging any of it.
- uLogMicheal 3y agoLearn history as it tells you or be banned from all primary services.
- progrus 3y agoA lot of people are still not ready to accept the ugly truth.
- selimthegrim 3y agoGitaGPT, coming soon to an Indian mobile device near you.
- beardedman 3y ago> the global south Care to elaborate what you mean by "the global south"? EDIT: Downvoted for asking a question? Did all the StackOverflow mods come to HN?
- MauranKilom 3y ago(Note that it's the StackOverflow users voting on questions - the same ones that you are soliciting answers from. Mods have actual moderation tasks to deal with.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fhd2 3y agoIt's a reasonably common concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_Sout...
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- AndrewKemendo 3y agoI'm actually surprised how rapidly this went downhill exactly how people were warning it would.
- kemotep 3y ago2 weeks after launch and a government is already able to disrupt their operations? Liz Truss lasted as Prime Minister for longer than that.
- 93po 3y agoThey've been deploying orbs and scanning for more than half a year.
- kemotep 3y agoOfficially they launched 2 weeks ago. You wouldn’t count the time from 2010 to 2022 where Liz Truss was in Parliament as part of her premiership. From what I understand, until the end of July when they launched, WLD was not yet available to people.
- 93po 3y agothe token itself had not launched, but basically everything else was in place
- wpietri 3y agoYeah, my take is that during the rise of the internet and mobile, tech earned a lot of social credit. But since then tech companies both large and small have been burning through that at a prodigious rate, especially social media, monopoly-seekers, and the trash fire that is crypto. If I had to sum up the new attitude of European regulators toward tech, it would be, "We're tired of your bullshit." I'm glad to see it. Maybe with some better policing, the tech sector will again turn into something I can be unambiguously proud about working in.
- 3y ago
- nwoli 3y ago> On Thursday, Worldcoin said it is planning to implement crowd-control measures and collaborate with the government before resuming work. What does this even mean?
- input_sh 3y agoIt means too many people were queueing to have their biometrics taken.
- verdverm 3y agoMore likely to get the $50 for doing so, then never use it
- justrealist 3y agoMaybe, but you shouldn't underestimate the popularity of mobile banking/money transfer apps in East Africa. If it's easier and more secure (against literal telecom hacks, we don't need to get into crypto debates) than the alternative it very plausibly can get users.
- victorbjorklund 3y agoThat is an argument against it. If they already solved the problem with mobile payments adding blockchain to the mix doesnt add any value.
- random_kris 3y agoAny good way to implement global payment network (mobile or not) that is not subject to government whims?
- pavlov 3y agoNo, because money transfers are such a central locus of government interest everywhere in the world. It’s like asking “any good way to avoid paying taxes?” You’ll definitely get lots of opinions, but you should also be cautious about taking the advice.
- alangibson 3y agoA huge amount of the value of big tech companies comes from outrunning regulators (AirBnB, Uber) and/or existing in a state of exception (section 230). Congrats to Kenya for calling BS in short order.
- cool_dude85 3y agoI think people also forget that Amazon was in this game too, refusing to collect and pay state sales tax to undercut brick-and-mortar.
- marban 3y agoAlso https://restofworld.org/2023/exporter-worldcoin-kenya-india-upi/ https://restofworld.org/2023/exporter-worldcoin-kenya-india-...
- antiviral 3y ago"Worldcoin, founded by US tech entrepreneur Sam Altman, offers free crypto tokens to people who agree to have their eyeballs scanned." Can anyone say how much each of those crypto tokens are worth in $USD?
- Legend2440 3y ago$0
- pavel_lishin 3y agoNo, because they'll fluctuate wildly. But you can generally bet on a trend towards zero.
- night-rider 3y ago> Can anyone say how much each of those crypto tokens are worth in $USD? https://coinmill.com/WDC_calculator.html https://coinmill.com/WDC_calculator.html
- remcob 3y ago> The exchange rate for the WorldCoin was last updated on October 21, 2019. This is a different token. And I wouldn't trust a site with such outdated rates.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Nouser76 3y agoIIRC from reading a few days ago it was worth ~$60 USD.
- mminer237 3y ago$2.04 per token at the moment: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/worldcoin/usd https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/worldcoin/usd You get 25 WLD for getting scanned, hence the huge queue in a developing country.
- Legend2440 3y agoI really don't want to have anything to do with crypto, and the fact that Sam Altman is pushing it in 2023 makes both him and OpenAI look sketchy. Especially crypto with a weird biometric eye scanner.
- c31931b 3y ago[dead]
- boppo1 3y agoYeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me. If I say "The founder of OpenAI is scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" that sets off real alarm bells.
- tim333 3y agoYeah but "scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" is untrue. You can scare a lot of people by telling them untrue stuff.
- reaperducer 3y agoYeah but "scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" is untrue. That is literally what he is doing. People walk up to an "orb," get their eyeballs scanned, and a unique key goes into a database. What part of the parent's statement is untrue?
- tim333 3y agoThe purpose is to build a financial system although data is involved. It's a bit like saying banking is a scheme to get your financial data. I mean banks have your data but it's not the purpose.
- redox99 3y agoPretty sad. They don't care about regulation that would potentially have a profound impact for everybody, but they care about people voluntarily doing something for a silly crypto token?
- ramesh31 3y agoTaxation and control of the money supply is the single most powerful and fundamental right reserved by a government, and it's backed up by lots and lots of guns. Godspeed with changing that, crypto bros.
- kayamon 3y agoDo you solve all your problems by shooting people?
- ramesh31 3y ago> Do you solve all your problems by shooting people? All power on earth emanates from the barrel of a gun. We abstract that fact away in modern polite society, but it is the base level truth of our existence. So yes, when it comes down to it, governments can, will, (and have) used guns to solve this.
- kayamon 3y agoGlad you're not in the government. Some people know how to wield power without hurting people.
- oaththrowaway 3y agoGovernments tend to
- scottiebarnes 3y agoDo you have reference to a nation state in history that warred their way out of a debt spiral?
- mrguyorama 3y agoGreat Britain actually did this regularly. For hundreds of years they would war all over europe until they ran out of money, make up some scheme to refill the coffers (including eventually inventing the central bank and other shenanigans with the "South Sea" bubble), and then go back to war in europe.
- gumballindie 3y agoDid Sam Altman forget to bribe the right people? Because if he would bribe I would understand why governments would allow a private entity to steal data, content, ip, and identities en masse, as it currently happens in some jurisdictions.
- alangibson 3y agoI'm waiting for religious zealots to start smashing those Orbs. Looking at long lines of people waiting to stare into one is enough to make me (very briefly) wonder if my crazy uncle might have had a point with his take on Revelations.
- uLogMicheal 3y agoIf they can put bounties on eyes, orb bounties are fair game?
- rgrieselhuber 3y ago> Revelations It was rather prescient on this point
- pessimizer 3y agoDirect action is infinitely more effective than tweeting.
- ramesh31 3y agoWorld-where-we-haven't-been-regulated-yet-coin
- vvpan 3y agoI know a lot of people will use this to say that blockchain bad, and that is up to you. But really biometrics collection has little to do with blockchain. Worldcoin is firstly a company that collects biometrics and secondly they decided to use an immutable ledger to record the data (although they claim that it is only hashes). That aside if I wanted to record a bunch of hashes for perpetuity blockchain would actually be the right technology - does not go out of business and take down the servers with it. The article makes me laugh and sad at the same time though. This Altman guy...
- jabradoodle 3y agoBlockchain would not be the right tech if you don't need decentralised trust. Write once media on a server is what you want.
- landemva 3y ago> Write once media ... Like publishing merkle tree hash in a few daily newspapers.
- humanizersequel 3y ago>Write once media on a server is what you want How does that solve this problem: >[company will] go out of business and take down the servers with it
- roncesvalles 3y agoOpen-source it, publish it somewhere or make it a bittorrent. Using blockchain as a hosting solution feels like a misuse.
- tracker1 3y agodistributed public key, and a private-signed hash of the dataset.
- px43 3y ago
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoRelated: Sam Altman saying himself that users who are concerned about privacy should not sign up: https://youtu.be/4HFyXYvMwFc?t=3186 https://youtu.be/4HFyXYvMwFc?t=3186
- 93po 3y agoThat's not what he said. He said people that won't trust any platform [regardless of the reassurances, auditing, open source nature, etc] are welcome to not sign up. I assume the somewhat pointed subtext of what Sam said is also that if you're going to be a hater no matter what, he doesn't seem the point in engaging with you.
- appplication 3y agoAs much as the whole worldcoin thing is bizarre and dystopian, I do sort of enjoy the nouveau nihilistic take that you can’t trust or believe anything anyone says anyways, so if trust matters to you, you might want to stay away from the digital future.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- villgax 3y agoCryptoBro Sam Altman will have to deal with goat eyes being scanned in as well pretty soon
- gus_massa 3y agoHow long do goats live? Can I keep their eyes after they die? Can I scan my turtle instead?
- carabiner 3y agoWhy does this have to be a crypto currency? My ssn is not a currency and it is used for id. Why can't it be like that, a database of id's? Should we make our drivers licenses or passports into crypto currencies? What is the advantage?
- mrguyorama 3y agoWell you see, me and my SV rich buddies can't pre-mine and then sell a driver's license.
- jonathankoren 3y agoIt’s literally a solution in search of a problem. They’d say it proves you’re an actual human and not a fake profile, but there are existing solutions to that, and it doesn’t solve identity theft at all.
- carabiner 3y agoPG: Make something people want. No Kenyan ever: Yeah I want a crypto currency that scans my eyeball, that'd sure make my life better!
- Hizonner 3y agoThe "existing solutions" all rely on tying every single thing you do to every single other thing you do, which is a very nasty constraint.
- jonathankoren 3y agono.
- elxx 3y agoSame as every project that involves cryptocurrency - the advantage is that the scammers who promote it can make money from badly reinventing an existing system.
- abj 3y agoInteresting interview with Peter Thiel walking alone with Sam Altman in 2015. Wondering if anyone here can shed some light on what this is https://youtu.be/iPis68U7bdo https://youtu.be/iPis68U7bdo
- gsky 3y agoWorldCoin is a stupid idea and the entire crypto thing is a scam but these things are not as bad as MLM, lotteries and gambling. Everytime some country tries to ban them they will come under heavy US & WTO pressure. Why do you think it's like that?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BoorishBears 3y agoBecause they're not as bad as crypto. You can find all three of those in much worse forms embedded within crypto. There's this recurring refrain that the US is threatened by losing its reserve currency powers to bitcoin, Bitcoin can't be a reserve currency. The great depression was caused by double digit deflation, Bitcoin experiences double digit deflation and inflation every few months.
- gsky 3y agoBut crypto is not the thing that ruining ordinary people lives
- gillytech 3y agoWorldcoin puts off extremely bad vibes. I'm glad Africa is ejecting this mess.
- yieldcrv 3y agoJust Nairobi but maybe the other 50 nations and all their municipalities follow suit
- Hizonner 3y agoWorldcoin does the whole thing wrong. What they SHOULD do is to-- 1. Scan biometrics. They should not restrict themselves to just irises, because not everybody has irises or eyes. But they should only scan things that you can get surreptitiously without too much work... meaning things that everybody gives away anyway just by walking down the street. 2. Bind the biometrics to keys generated only for that purpose, and never used for anything but attesting to other keys... in zero-knowledge so that you can't associate different sub-keys attested by a given master key. 3. NOT bind the biometrics to names or any other information about the person. 4. Go right ahead and publish the biometrics themselves, together with the associated public master keys. Because again, they are not things anybody should be thinking of as secret... and pretending you can keep them secret is foolish even if you don't put them in a database. 5. Stop centralizing the system that attests to the bindings given in (4); do the work to eliminate trust from that. Or at LEAST don't go out of your way to RELY on a centtral authority. Once you have that, you have all you need for Sybil resistance, which gives you the global uniqueness they need. Then go build your crypto system on top of it.
- 93po 3y ago1. For now they do collect biometrics with opt-in, because it's valuable data for refining the ability to scan only irises and determine if they're legitimate 2. I can see this being a good idea 3. They don't
- rwiggum 3y agoThis is actually what they're building. They publish ZK proofs over the biometric data instead of publishing the biometric data itself.
- Hizonner 3y agoTheir critical error is that there's a single, central authority that certifies that a person with a given set of biometrics exists. They didn't bite off the hard, but necessary, part where you figure out how walk an attestation graph and come up with a confidence level. And they only do irisis. And they're doing the ZK at the wrong point in the chain. Publishing the actual, raw, unhashed biometrics wouldn't be a problem as long as they didn't tie them to anything but a key. And that future-proofs you.
- Y_Y 3y agoA lot of shops have popped up recently in the city purporting to sell high-res prints of your iris. I thought it was pretty weird, in the same level as mattress stores suddenly appearing everywhere. Now I wonder if there isn't some iris-scanning crypto scam underneath.
- JaggerFoo 3y agoWell, another ideas used for identity in the crypto world was having a twitter account for more than a specific time period, and a number of followers. So I was considered unidentifiable as a person because I had a Twitter account that did not have the requisite number of followers - so I couldn't get test network tokens for development work. SMH. Limited partners (pension funds) are paying for this aspirational idea (less any funds from selling tokens perhaps) while a16z will pocket a Venture Capital fee. Lots of money sitting around might as well roll the dice.
- 2-718-281-828 3y agoseems like several african countries are getting fed up with post- and neo-colonialism especially with regard to attemps of the west to control their economy by parasitic currencies like the cfa tethered to the franc guaranteeing cheap French access to their natural resources while at the same time handicapping the competitiveness of their economy.
- twelve40 3y agocharitable interpretation: this project is trying to address the problem of distributed and anonymized KYC. Because the current setup where you upload your passport to Coinbase turned out to be a cruel joke on the original idea of a cryptocurrency: it's the exact opposite of anonymous/pseudonymous, and the exact opposite of distributed. By this point Coinbase is really no different than a bank (with one "improvement" that it also tries to entice you to play lottery with shitcoins). Whether it will succeed or has any additional agenda i have no idea.
- 93po 3y agoThis is pretty off based on my understanding of Worldcoin. They want the opposite: they don't want to know who you are. They only thing they are interested in is are you a verified unique human, or operating the account of someone is a verified unique human (less than ideal but will happen). The biggest use cases for this are to establish a finite limit of online accounts to combat inauthentic online behavior, to provide a robust way to vote, and to provide robust way to evenly distribute UBI.
- hippomille1 3y agoI was just traveling recently and found a number of iris art shops set up in high traffic tourist areas. These IRis Art shops (places that scan your iris and enlarge it into a picture for you) seem to me to be capable of the same aim as world coin.