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Worldcoin hit with temporary ban in Spain over privacy concerns
- delichon 3y agoFor someone confident in the benefits of his products, Sam is working awfully hard on finding an antidote.
- tim333 3y agoAI is coming whether Sam builds it or not. Also Worldcoin wasn't his idea, he's just an investor in it.
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- ravenstine 3y agoNever heard of this "Worldcoin" thing before. From Wikipedia: > Worldcoin is an iris biometric cryptocurrency project From the Worldcoin website: > World ID 2.0 > A more human passport for the internet. Eww. I appreciate cryptocurrency, but biometrics + crypto? Heck off.
- quenix 3y agoWith Sam Altman from OpenAI spearheading it, no less.
- PheonixPharts 3y agoI was chatting with a few Chinese crypto people the other day, and the general consensus in that community seems to be that Worldcoin basically operates as an ATM for Sam Altman. He undoubtedly owns a considerable amount, and it doesn't matter if it's a long term successful so long in the near term it has a multiplying impact on his OpenAI work. If you look at the 1 year change in WLD you see that he's likely made a pretty sum from it already, especially since whatever amount of WLD he own was acquired at effectively zero cost[0]. The people I was chatting with shared a similar view to dogecoin and Musk. All either needs to do is drive up a little hype and in to time they have access to tremendous amounts of liquidity. 0. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/worldcoin-org/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/worldcoin-org/
- tsunamifury 3y agoWhy aren't we taking it more seriously that our supposed world-leading founders and business people are simply running pump and dumb schemes with Worldcoin, Doge, and ETF/SPACs?
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoIt is hilarious to me how many of the twitter accounts who swore up and down crypto was the future are now shilling for AI instead. It's obvious they don't know or care very much about anything, they're just determined to keep riding hype waves and try to cash out.
- PheonixPharts 3y agoIt's sort of like the twist at the end of Soylent Green. The real twist isn't that "Soylent Green is people!" the twist is that you can see this with your own eyes, shout it in the street, but ultimately no one really cares.
- JohnFen 3y agoDo people not care, or do people not believe? My take on that movie wasn't that nobody cared, but that nobody believed the crazy-sounding man yelling weird-sounding things in public.
- tsunamifury 3y agoThat can be one the same phenomenon.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoWhy should anyone care? I certainly don't and find it curious that others have an interest at all. I have always viewed people arguing for or against crypto as equivalent to nerds arguing if batman or superman is better. Utterly irrelevant to me.
- dorkwood 3y agoPeople got scared when they started scanning thousands of people's eyeballs in Africa. It didn't matter that Sam Altman had a good explanation for doing it. Because cryptocurrency is involved, it must be bad, right?
- skullone 3y agoLol what's this good explanation of scanning people's eyes?
- shagie 3y agoIdentity management. I want to give food or money to 1000 distinct people in some part of the world. How do I make sure that 1000 distinct people do it and it's not just 100 people getting in the line 10 times each? What source of identity does everyone have (yes, there are exceptions) and on the more difficult to lose side (industrial accidents are more likely to damage fingers than eyes)?
- kemotep 3y agoBut why is a crypto currency required? Biometrics like Apple’s Face ID reasonably identify the owners of a phone. Why not distribute managed iPhones with access to an account to wire money to or an app that displays a code that aid workers can use to identify that the right person got the goods? That phone or app could be set to only generate one code per aid delivery event and without a code you don’t get aid. Someone having multiple phones would be easy to identify as the aid worker would recognize they are back in line. I mean if your goal is to end fraud there seems to be several options that don’t require a blockchain or some custom eye scanning device. How does worldcoin solve the issue of a local abusing a position of power to direct everyone to transfer their funds to their account or with holding some other resource to force people to give them their aid?
- gs17 3y agoPart of the idea is to expand it beyond those, so anyone can verify that a user is representing a distinct, real human. It's supposed to be privacy preserving, so you could use it in user registration to block bots without needing to request any real identifying information. Of course, you've hit on part of the issue here, it's not going to really prevent a lot of the fraud it's intended to.
- Y_Y 3y agoThere are loads of stores in Spain offering to "create art" of your iris by taking a high-res scan and blowing it up to make a canvas print. They sprang up overnight a while back and as far as I know aren't fooling anyone.
- emptysongglass 3y agoSame in Copenhagen. I was wondering how in the world they were making money.
- gs17 3y agoThey're also in the US, but I don't think they're making WorldCoin accounts off of it (or using it to fake biometrics for other things). https://irisphoto.art/originalite https://irisphoto.art/originalite shows that iris photo art predates the coin by a long while. Some people just find the idea novel enough to pay for.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoI'm surprised that an HN reader hasn't heard of WorldCoin given how much Altman has been on HN recently. Prior to today you were a lucky person not to have heard of it. We need a corollary to https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ that celebrates blissful ignorance.
- secondcoming 3y agoTo be honest, I tend to gloss over anything ending with 'Coin'.
- zombiwoof 3y agoit's sam altmans version of a chip in your brain
- belter 3y agoYou can't even say kiss my a#%ss or he will run and scan it...
- _fat_santa 3y agoI'm convinced Worldcoin is just a massive biometric data gathering operation with a "we have a coin to save the world" being the cover story. Altman (for some reason) needs a ton of biometric data, so go around the world and especially to poorer places, offer folks funny money in exchange for their biometrics and run off. Set aside the moral and ethical questions and it's quite frankly a very good way to get your hands on this type of data.
- chihuahua 3y agoStep 1: Record biometrics from millions of poor people. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit. It's a bit like the outlandish COVID vaccine conspiracy theories: Step 1: Vaccinate people and deploy 5G wireless networks. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Total power over people; world domination.
- _fat_santa 3y agoTotal speculation but it could be used as training data for GPT5 or whatever they are doing at OpenAI. I could totally see a scenario where they would want to train an AI on biometrics data and then sell that to the govt.
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- rurp 3y agoWell for one thing a database of biometric records gives you an immutable way to impersonate those people on any other platform that relies on the same biometrics. But that's kind of beside the point. I wouldn't be at all confident that you or I thinking about this problem for a few minutes are going to uncover every possible abuse vector that a motivated nefarious actor will in the future. Collecting this kind of private data for no clear benefit looks sketchy as hell.
- reducesuffering 3y agoHN has become quite kneejerk-cynic, but let me explain what Worldcoin is supposed to solve in Sam Altman's eyes. #1: AGI is coming soon. #1.a: Because of #1, there will be a flood of unverifiable bot activity on the internet, easily outnumbering real human interaction by 100x+. The only way to identify other humans is some sort of biometric verification process. #1.b: Because of #1, the vast majority of people will become an economic net-negative. They can't outproduce an easily replicable AGI more than they consume. Thus we need a Universal Basic Income (without the messy fraud) and a way to evenly distribute it, so that people can still enjoy a decent quality of life. Sama has written about these concerns on his blog about a decade ago. Or just believe it's "because money $"
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- nosmokewhereiam 3y agoAny security to protect someone from just stealing your eye in a parking lot...? One or two of these events on the news would quickly sink this.
- pelagicAustral 3y agoWhat a grim attack vector
- hef19898 3y agoThere is this scene in demolition man...
- justinclift 3y agoIt's a common movie trope now whenever biometric security is involved. "Lets just take their <eye/finger/hand/head> with us to get into the <base/facility/lab>".
- lotsofpulp 3y agoBeen a trope for at least as long as I’ve been watching movies, which is 30 years.
- justinclift 3y agoGood point yeah.
- fnoof 3y agoThe scanner uses some neural nets and an IR camera to see if everything around the iris checks out. So you can’t (easily at least) scan some disembodied eyes, or your dog’s eyes.
- tim333 3y agoIt wouldn't work very well with Worldcoin. They were not accepting detached eyeballs when I went.
- AndrewStephens 3y agoWorldcoin is one of the dumbest "this is technically possible so why not" ideas to be floated in the last few years, standing out even in the field of stupid cryptocurrency adjacent endeavors. I still haven't really figured out why they want to scan eyeballs. Biometrics might be part of a secure solution to account access but I would hate to lose access to my account because I got in a accident and lost an eye. I do not believe the conspiracy theories about gathering biometric data, if only because what would be the point? But the stated reasons are so silly that it is easy to believe in an ulterior motive.
- diggan 3y agoI think the point is "Proof of Personhood/Humanity/Individual". There is a huge problem in the cryptocurrency space where you don't know if 10 accounts belong to 10 individuals, or one individual. So a bunch of projects are trying to figure out a solution to this, to prevent sybil attacks. Gitcoin Passport is one of those solutions, where you can connect various accounts to a "Passport", which you can then hand over to services who can see you have a certain score, but not exactly what that Passport is connected to, so you still preserve your privacy. I think Worldcoin is another attempt at this, with the idea that the iris scans they do are unique in the world. So basically like a normal cryptocurrency wallet, except these ones also have a ID/hash or something that indicates their "iris value" or something. Then Worldcoin can guarantee/prove that one individual only has one wallet. At least that's my understand of it, happy to be corrected. (Guess I should add that I personally don't use or support Worldcoin at all, but I have read about it a couple of times at this point)
- AndrewStephens 3y agoThat is my superficial understanding as well but if we are both correct, what is the point? One of the only (dubious) advantages of crypto is that nothing ties a wallet to a person, or a wallet to another wallet unless they interact. How is WorldCoin better than just having a bank account that you have to go into a bank in person to set up?
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- tibanne 3y ago[flagged]
- treyd 3y ago...and Serbia, and...
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- vosper 3y agoWorldcoin is still a thing? Does anyone care about it? I figured at this point it was just another failed cryptocurrency venture.
- tim333 3y agoThe coins are doing ok - up about 4x from the start. Signing up the world population is stuggling a bit though.
- fsflover 3y agoDiscussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39617745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39617745
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe]
- diggan 3y agoAs far as I understand the original source (https://www.aepd.es/prensa-y-comunicacion/notas-de-prensa/la https://www.aepd.es/prensa-y-comunicacion/notas-de-prensa/la...), Worldcoin has: - Not provided enough information about how the data is stored/used - Collected data from minors - Not offered individuals to withdraw their consent So the data protection agency of Spain is temporary halting any data processing/transfers, in order to protect people from the unlawful collection. Is this the first time "Urgency procedure"/Article 66 (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-66-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-66-gdpr/) of the GDPR is being used in the wild?
- jt2190 3y agoIt’ll also be interesting to see how these privacy regulations interact with “Proof of Humanity” (POH) schemes in the long run. For example, if POH becomes a fundamental security precaution to do financial transactions [1] would you be opting out of most of the modern economy? Edit: If my memory is correct, Worldcoin claims to have a “key” that was generated using your retina, but the key is not associated with your identity. You can then present the key to a third party who can verify with Worldcoin that you are human, but not a specific person. [1] Imagine a bot that could impersonate you and drain your bank account, for example.
- bigbacaloa 3y ago[dead]
- rantee 3y agoIt’s beyond laughable that the company didn’t better address these concerns beyond performative press releases without the need for regulatory intervention before rolling out in any jurisdiction, let alone the EU. Whatever one’s opinion on the privacy implications, it’s a simply embarassing business* move given the number of countries with data protection legislation (and/or active regulators). * or whatever motive one wishes to ascribe to the mix of for- and non-profit entities involved in muddying the waters OpenAI-style
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- ribosometronome 3y agoSam Altman does link OpenAI and WorldCoin.
- ffpip 3y ago> Product named Worldcoin > banned in a country
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- bagels 3y agoHow much traction does this creepy project have?
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoAny traction is too much.
- wkat4242 3y agoA lot. There were serious queues here in Spain, especially in the beginning.
- tim333 3y ago4 million people I think. More than zero, a lot less than the world population. Also so far most users are there for the free money, not for using it for ID or a payment system, myself included mostly. Actually I also signed up to a large extent out or curiosity. I know HN hates it but it actually seems quite an interesting experiment.
- seanhunter 3y agoThis is interesting to me. On the one hand "Proof of humanity" is an important problem and is surely only going to get more important as time passes. Bots are already better than humans at solving captchas.[1] On the other hand I cannot conceive of giving someone my biometric data so they can mint some blockchain thing from it, and although I admit I wasn't interested enough to look into it beyond reading a couple of articles, I really don't see how this specific solution makes the situation better. Eg how do they know someone hasn't pwned me and then hijacked my special proof of humanity token to using it for their bots to "prove humanity"? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12108 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12108
- dsco 3y agoThey don't, but it's harder to kidnap someone and use their eye, as opposed to steal some other piece of identification. If you would turn it around and imagine a world without paper passports and government issued id's - what would you use as unique identifier for a person?
- pjmorris 3y ago> If you would turn it around and imagine a world without paper passports and government issued id's - what would you use as unique identifier for a person? I'm not sure... but I'm also convinced that 'private corporation issued id' isn't fundamentally superior to 'government issued id' and has some challenges in terms of accountability.
- melenaboija 3y agoBeing pwned does not solely mean having access to your eye in this case, also why should I trust a corporation more than a government?
- itishappy 3y ago> it's harder to kidnap someone and use their eye, as opposed to steal some other piece of identification Is it? I use my eyes a helluva lot more than I use my government issued SSN. In fact, I've only taken my physical SSN card out of storage once, but I stare at random (potentially camera equipped) stuff all day. Of course you can still steal it from me by pretending to ask for ID, but that's true of my eye-print as well.
- fodmap 3y agoThis is the original announcement by the AEPD, the Spanish Data Protection Authority. https://www.aepd.es/en/press-and-communication/press-releases/agency-orders-precautionary-measure-which-prevents-Worldcoin-from-continuing-toprocess-personal-data-in-spain https://www.aepd.es/en/press-and-communication/press-release...
- Rygian 3y agoI wonder why the ban hasn't become EU-wide right afterwards.
- fodmap 3y agoThat's a good question. I've waited a few days to reply to you, hoping that the EU would make a move. The only news afaik is that Worldcoin failed to get injunction against Spain’s privacy suspension https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/11/worldcoin-fails-to-get-injunction-against-spains-privacy-suspension/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/11/worldcoin-fails-to-get-inj...
- istinetz 3y ago[flagged]
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoThey are targeting financially challenged kids in malls, with 100 euros worth of coin for associating an iris scan with their personal information. It is opportunistic mass data collection. Even if lawful it is very much unethical and weaselly, on a par with loan sharks. They have done this all throughout south america and have now reached Southern Europe.
- dieortin 3y agoSo scams being illegal is paternalistic bullshit I guess?
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- nerdjon 3y agoSo I somehow completely missed that this was ever a thing. But let me get this straight. Sam is the CEO of OpenAI. Basically the company that is making it harder and harder to know what was made by a human or a machine. Out of concern over that, makes Worldcoin as some authentication method? So the problem he helped Shepard in, he has another company that he could make money on to fix said problem? Am I missing something here or is this... super shady sounding? That's before getting into the whole scanning our eyes for a few bucks thing.
- danlugo92 3y agoI don't think it's shady given we have competition.
- justinclift 3y ago> is this... super shady sounding? A lot of people have been trying to point that out for ages, without any real traction.
- benzible 3y agoIt gets worse... https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-orb-worldcoin-tools-for-humanity/ https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-orb-worldcoin-tools-f...
- benreesman 3y agoIt’s literally a plot point of countless dystopian books and movies. Either of OpenAI or WorldCoin would be a terrifying nightmare even without Altman and OpenPhilanthropy and the SEC investigation and what-the-hell-ever scared Ilya so bad he 180’d from a single phone call and Yud whipping the public and Congress into a frenzy talking about Terminator in two years. I don’t care how badly someone wants to be accepted into YC or whatever: this is the wrong side of history. “We are below them, we are above them, we are around them, we run through everything they do.” - Satya Nadella, Eyes Wide Shut
- BtTower 3y agoWhere can I read more about this phonecall Ilya had?
- prof-dr-ir 3y agoHah so at least Worldcoin no longer has to explain why nobody in Spain uses their product. I am afraid that they may not have an equally compelling explanation for the same problem in the rest of the world.
- wkat4242 3y agoIt wasn't nobody. People were lining up all the way outside of the mall. It's scary what people do for the price of a pair of cheap jeans.
- vasco 3y agoIf you had asked me how much money you'd have to pay someone for them to let you scan their eyeball, I have to say I would've said way more than €35 fake euros stuck in an app. If anything it's eye opening (eh) how little understanding there is of the personal risk people are taking on.
- wnevets 3y ago> If you had asked me how much money you'd have to pay someone for them to let you scan their eyeball People paid companies like 23andMe actual money for the privilege of mailing their DNA. Getting paid to let a company your eyeball sounds like an improvement.
- lottin 3y agoI think people pay these companies for providing them with information about their DNA, which is quite different.
- blacksmith_tb 3y agoEspecially given that you can download your genetic data from 23andme. I am not sure if Worldcoin allows you download a copy of your iris data... no mention in their FAQ, at least.
- xwolfi 3y agoBut they provide so little information compared to the DNA you provide. You get stuff like "ancestry" signals which americans love in their quest for racial validation, but they get to connect humans to a point they can find the family of an unknown murderer whose DNA was found on a crime scene. Which information is more precious overall, which is a call to action rather than a simple joke between friends "oh im 3% Banana".
- jgalt212 3y ago> "There's a sucker born every minute" is a phrase closely associated with P. T. Barnum, an American showman of the mid-19th century, although there is no evidence that he actually said it. Early examples of its use are found among gamblers and confidence tricksters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_minute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
- Retr0id 3y agoPrivacy aside, there's no way this can be done securely. According to https://worldcoin.org/be-a-worldcoin-operator https://worldcoin.org/be-a-worldcoin-operator they'll gladly ship the iris scanning unit to untrusted 3rd party operators, in a similar vein to a bank shipping out PoS card terminals. I'd love to have a play with one, it wouldn't surprise me if you could get it to mint fresh accounts out of thin air (e.g. by mitming the bus between the iris scanner and the rest of the unit, and making it report fresh unique scans)
- hdevalence 3y ago> by mitming the bus between the iris scanner and the rest of the unit, and making it report fresh unique scans Hmm, I wonder if the worldcoin team also thought of that possibility? (Yes, they did, the iris processing is done inside a hardware enclave so that the obvious attack is not possible) https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/technical-implementation https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/technical-implementation I am broadly anti-Worldcoin but it is reasonably competently executed at a technical level. It would be good to understand what they actually did before declaring it to be impossible.
- epolanski 3y agoCan't I just bypass it with some contact lenses that distort the scan and make it unique?
- Retr0id 3y agoHardware enclaves are never 100% impenetrable, it comes down to making the cost of attack greater than what an attacker expects to gain. Traditional card payment terminals use nominally secure hardware and yet struggle with that tradeoff to this day, and I'm not convinced WorldCoin will do any better. The SoC they're using, the Jetson Xavier NX, is a cousin of the very thoroughly pwned (secure enclaves and all) TX1. Further, they don't describe how the busses connecting the sensors to the SoC are encrypted and/or authenticated, which leads me to believe that they are not. Intel gave up on shipping SGX in consumer devices because (imho) shipping secure enclaves directly to "adversaries" (the consumer being an adversary under the SGX threat model) proved too difficult to maintain.
- aussieguy1234 3y agoHow easy is it to trick this iris scanner with a fake eye?
- tim333 3y agoHard. They have people looking at what you are up to and there is gadetry similar to the iphone face scanner that can tell a face from say a photo of a face.
- gitgud 3y agoThere’s so many issues with biometrics: - You can’t change them if they’re compromised - They’re unreliable, they can change with age, depends on the environment that they’re measured in - It’s not really “proof of humanity” just “proof of biology” Worldcoin is an interesting attempt though
- wkat4242 3y agoOh cool! There was a whole load of these zombies lining up here in the local shopping centre to give Altman their irises. They're free to do so of course but they're lowering the barrier for privacy significantly by presenting the world with the reality of a significant proportion of the population with their irises scanned. Thus it will be harder for us to keep our privacy just like privacy on internet is gone as a fait accompli. People are already using this as a debate argument against privacy: "Your privacy is already gone anyway so why do you care about this new issue?". That's how bad things have become. The same way as that, having a significant portion of society do this, will mean I'll be unable to prove I'm not a bot without getting my own eyes scanned in the future.
- tim333 3y agoI've done the zombie thing and it's less of a privacy issue than you might think. They don't need your name or contact details, though you can optionally give some.
- wkat4242 3y agoYour name is most likely a lot less unique than your iris is. They don't need it. Once more services start using iris scanning it can all be correlated. The issue is not now but for the future.
- kouru225 3y agoDo we really need to scan irises in order to do this? What we need is centralized media. If I want to post an image from CNN, I should be able to just to repost whatever CNN has already posted. That way we can retain CNNs digital signature on the post and my audience can check the signature and know it’s real. We don’t need the irises. We just need brand loyalty.
- sirsinsalot 3y agoThe problem with big brained plays such as Altman's OpenAI and WC double bet is that they're plays created by people with such an ego and lack of compassion that they forget that ... humans will still be humans. When all is said and done, none of this changes that. Humans will push back against non-human things ... with regulations and eventually violence. This is why nations spend so much time hiding the non-human factors acting against them. Will AI prevent me from feeling human feelings? No. To Altman and many others this seems like world changing stuff, but is it?
- tim333 3y agoWorldcoin's postion is >“Our efforts to engage with the AEPD and provide them with an accurate view of Worldcoin and World ID have gone unanswered for months,” he added. (FT article) Personally I go with the free market idea that if a company wants to provide a service and users want to take advantage of it, 4 million+ so far including myself, then governments provide limited value by blocking that unless they can show it's actually harming people.
- regularjack 3y agoWhat service exactly is WorldCoin providing to the "users" here?
- tim333 3y agoThere are three main things. An anonymous ID as proof of being a unique human, a payments system where you can send coins to other accounts, and free coins.