As people around the world line up to have their eyeballs scanned in exchange for some cryptocurrency, the world’s governments are again asking themselves: “Can Sam Altman do that?” The OpenAI CEO, who set off the current generative AI frenzy, is making a bid to upend the future of cryptocurrency and personal identification by tying people’s biometrics to their digital identity in order to verify they are human. The world’s privacy regulators are starting to ask whether this vision of the future is legal. Kenya’s Interior Ministry suspended the project over data protection concerns yesterday, making it the first country to take that action. Privacy regulators in the United Kingdom, France and Germany have also raised concerns about Worldcoin’s data privacy practices after its July 24 launch. Even by the expansive standards of crypto, Altman’s project is ambitious. Altman has cast the token, which users can receive by creating a unique identifier based on a scan of their iris, as a way of “preserving humanness in the age of AI” during a time when distinguishing between people and bots online is becoming increasingly difficult. In addition to functioning as money, Altman wants Worldcoin’s eyeball-based identifiers to become something like a social security number for the age of the global internet, paving the way for nation-spanning projects like universal basic income. Worldcoin’s sponsors also want governments and corporations to use its biometric data to keep track of individuals, Reuters reported yesterday. Not surprisingly, the project — which counts more than 2 million users so far — has encountered intense skepticism. Critics point out that the project’s founders and investors have retained about a quarter of the Worldcoin supply for themselves, in the hopes that the token appreciates in value. But much of the backlash relates to what one crypto executive called the “incredibly neocolonial optics” of Worldcoin’s launch, which has residents of developing countries lining up to have their eyes scanned in exchange for a network ID and some Worldcoin tokens, which are currently fetching about $2 a pop, according to data from CoinMarketCap. People are lining up in the developed world too, but securities laws in the U.S. means Americans can only receive a Worldcoin ID — the equivalent of an account on the network — not crypto tokens. Residents of Texas, Illinois, Washington and U.S. cities with strict privacy laws are also banned from getting their eyeballs scanned by Worldcoin, according to a report in TechCrunch. One person who has been involved in Worldcoin’s compliance efforts attributed the regulatory blowback to the eye-scanning spectacle. “These governments want to be seen as taking action when in reality they’ve been in conversations with the company for over a year,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to discuss the project’s internal dynamics and government contacts. The person said France’s privacy regulator, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty, has talked with Worldcoin representatives about compliance in recent months. The regulator did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Given the combination of crypto and eyeball scanning, government scrutiny is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Among other things, it will force privacy regulators to familiarize themselves with zero-knowledge proofs, a cutting-edge encryption technique featured last summer in DFD, that is adding an extra level of secrecy into the latest generation of crypto projects, including Worldcoin. In a statement, the Worldcoin Foundation, a Caymanian nonprofit associated with the project, said it “complies with all laws and regulations governing the processing of personal data in the markets where Worldcoin is available,” including the Europe Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The foundation also said it “looks forward to resuming its services in Kenya while working closely with local regulators.”
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