I thought the orbs were supposedly open source

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.

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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.

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