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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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I thought the orbs were supposedly open source and not actually transmitting/collecting any biometric data, just using it to create unique ids? But these quotes and articles seem to be taking it as a given that the scans are in fact collected. It feels like a really crucial part of this story is completely missing here; if there’s some evidence that they are in fact collecting the data despite claiming not to, that should be worth mentioning. It would also be something to mention if there is no such evidence and the Spanish regulators here are implying risks that aren’t actually there, but expect it to be a popular move regardless because the public generally hates cryptocurrency, AI, and Sam Altman.
I’m also wondering how they feel about all the various phones and other devices that use fingerprint and face scans for authentication, public facing cameras transmitting to the cloud that can have face or gait recognition algorithms attached, the scanning done in airports, etc. There’s a bunch of reasons to dislike WorldCoin but this seems maybe not well thought out.
No they are proprietary as a whole. Parts of the hardware design are published, and parts of the software that runs on them, but not the whole thing.
Fundamentally Worldcoin is about ‘one person, one vote’, and anyone can create millions of fake iris images; the point of the orb is that it is ‘blessed’ hardware using trusted computing (or to use the term coined by the FSF, treacherous computing) and tamper detection to make sure that a central authority (namely Sam Altman’s Worldcoin foundation) has signed off on the orb running the exact secret / proprietary software running on the orb that generates an identity.
They could have alternatively have built a system that leverages government identity using zero-knowledge proof of possession of a government-signed digital identity document. But I think their fundamental thesis is that they are trustworthy to be a central authority who could create millions of fake identities if they wanted, but that governments are not.
I buy the centralization/trust criticism, if not the idea that government id would be an acceptable or functioning alternative (it’s not the case that every government is trustworthy or that everyone in the world has id or that those ids are easily verifiable). There’s also the problem of people being able to just sell their credentials. But it still seems misleading to focus on the idea that there is a big danger here of biometric data being collected when it likely isn’t and when it already is used and collected in many other contexts.