Privacy regulators in several countries have been sniffing around Sam Altman’s Worldcoin project since it launched last week, but now one country has outright suspended it: Kenya.
Worldcoin is a very grand scheme with multiple facets. The ultimate aim is to provide a system through which people can prove they are humans and not A.I. To achieve this, Worldcoin is trying to entice people into having their eyes scanned by offering them a new cryptocurrency called WLD, which it has claimed may also “show a potential path for A.I.-funded universal basic income” (UBI) after A.I. takes lots of jobs. (The token is currently not available to those signing up in the U.S.)
Kenya was a pretty big player in Worldcoin’s first stage, playing host to at least 18 of its iris-scanning sites—the scanners are called Orbs. According to Reuters, over 350,000 Kenyans have already signed up, with each receiving 25 WLD. But this morning, Kenya’s interior ministry halted all Worldcoin activity in the country, until its agencies have established whether there are risks to the public. The agencies are looking into data-protection implications and “how the harvesters intend to use the data.”
Worldcoin said in a statement that it had paused verification services in Kenya “out of an abundance of caution and in an effort to mitigate crowd volume,” and that it would use the break to “work with local officials to increase understanding of the privacy measures and commitments Worldcoin implements.” The operation certainly shows no sign of pulling back in general.
Ricardo Macieira, European general manager at Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, told Reuters it would be rolling out to “all the parts of the world that will accept us.” He also described Worldcoin as an “infrastructure” that third parties could then use, giving the example of a coffee shop that could use the system to verify that people aren’t claiming too many coffees under a one-free-coffee promotion.
“I don’t think we are going to be the ones generating universal basic income. If we can do the infrastructure that allows for governments or other entities to do so we would be very happy,” Macieira said.
I remain very unconvinced that governments will want to play along. First, it’s possible that regulators investigating Worldcoin data-protection implications, such as the Bavarian privacy watchdog and its Kenyan counterpart, will find some kind of showstopper in there, most likely relating to the biometric data being recorded by Orbs.
On the one hand, Worldcoin plausibly claims not to store any biometric data—once the image of a person’s iris has been processed within the Orb, the only thing that gets recorded is “a numerical representation of the texture of a person’s iris” that can’t be reverse-engineered to reveal the original image. Nonetheless, there is collection of biometric data going on, and both EU and Kenyan privacy laws place strict conditions on that. Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, such sensitive data can only be collected/processed with explicit, freely given user consent. Worldcoin’s consent form and privacy notice are both very long, and with the lure of free tokens being thrown into the mix, it’s very possible that regulators will see a problem.
But perhaps more important, I don’t really get why governments—or coffee shops for that matter—would turn to Worldcoin. I totally understand why Worldcoin is enjoying so much hype: Altman’s involvement, seemingly as a hedge against a dystopian future that his OpenAI company may help to trigger; those shiny Orbs; the promise of free stuff. But apart from that, this seems like yet another crypto scheme offering vague solutions to barely existent problems.
What’s more, governments may see Worldcoin as an unacceptable power play. There’s a good case for UBI, even before A.I. automates a significant proportion of jobs, and finding the money is certainly a big political problem, but why reconfigure a country’s economy around an American-German tech outfit’s distribution platform? Remember how government pushback killed off Facebook’s Libra scheme because of its privacy problems and threat to central banks? I fear Altman and Worldcoin are suffering from political naivete.
It certainly didn’t take Kenya’s government long to react. Let’s see if others follow. More news below.
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David Meyer
