Scan your “eye iris” with a round metal sphere to earn free cryptocurrency; it might sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but new unicorn Worldcoin is bringing it to life In real life.
What are Worldcoins?
Worldcoin is an encryption project established in 2020 by Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, with the goal of creating an open source protocol for global financial fairness and inclusiveness.
According to the report of the McKinsey Global Institute, there are currently more than 4.4 billion people who have no legal identity or cannot verify their identity through digital means. The vision of Worldcoin is to build the world's largest and fair digital identity and digital currency system. Scan the iris of every eyeball on the planet for identity verification.
Worldcoin has three main tasks, creating a global identity ID, a global currency, and a wallet that carries the identity ID and currency . You can use your own Token and other digital assets and traditional currencies for payment, purchase and transfer. These three tasks correspond to three elements:
- WorldID: digital identity based on privacy protection and personality proof
- WorldCoin: The first Token distributed freely to people around the world, plan to distribute to 1 billion people
- WorldAPP: Wallet for payments, purchases and transfers worldwide
The dark side behind the grand ideal
However, behind the huge vision and ideal of Worldcoin, there is a little-known dark side. The article reported by Eileen Guo and Adi Renaldiarchive in MIT Technology Review in April revealed more unknown things in the early days of Worldcoin. secret.
MIT Technology Review interviewed more than 35 people in six countries (Indonesia, Kenya, Sudan, Ghana, Chile, and Norway), including: Worldcoin employees, Worldcoin representatives, Worldcoin users, Worldcoin recruiters, etc.
According to the survey results, it was found that there is a huge gap between Worldcoin’s promotion and actual operation. They used similar deceptive marketing methods and collected huge amounts of personal data without their knowledge and consent. This approach may has violated the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Worldcoin believes that the existing conventional biometric authentication, including fingerprints, faces, etc., is difficult to accurately accommodate the information of billions of people. For example, the data abundance of FaceID can only accommodate a few million people. Therefore, its team developed a spherical machine called "Orb" to scan irises, allowing people around the world to obtain free cryptocurrency by scanning irises.
As of now, Worldcoin has scanned 450,000 eyes, faces and bodies in 24 countries, 14 of which are developing countries and eight are in Africa, and they aim to gain 1 billion registered users by 2023.
Why is Worldcoin targeting low-income regions first, rather than crypto enthusiasts?
It is questionable why Worldcoin, as a crypto project, targets low-income areas first, rather than crypto enthusiasts?
MIT Technology Review interviewed residents of an Indonesian village called Gunungguruh. One sunny morning, Worldcoin held some kind of "social assistance giveaway" at the Islamic primary school in the village of Gunungguruh, which attracted many residents to join the queue, including students around the age of 15, which in fact violated Worldcoin own terms of use.
Worldcoin staff were busy registering about a dozen students, helping them download the app and register for email, and finally scanning their biometrics and providing information about the cryptocurrency, Worldcoin itself, or how participants could grant or revoke consent. (Students receive at least a certain amount of their Worldcoin, which is distributed weekly).
Recently, Worldcoin held a recruitment drive in about 20 villages in Indonesia. In the pandemic-hit economy, many local village residents were attracted by the campaign in the name of aid. Worldcoin paid a fee of 2,000 rupiah for each successful scan (approximately $0.14). In response, the principal of a local school explained that he had been told the night before that his school would be used as a Worldcoin registration site, and because the instructions came from higher-level officials, he could not refuse the request.
But for the villagers who participated in the event, they didn’t know anything about it. Many people thought it was organized by the government itself, but they were obliged to know that this was not a government project, it was a foreign company called Worldcoin. As reported by the "MIT Technology Review", Worldcoin took advantage of the information gap in low-income areas and used deceptive marketing techniques to defraud many local users of personal information.
Collecting data is easy where there is no legal protection
Berea University professor Pete Howson is a scholar who studies cryptocurrencies in international development. In an email to MIT Technology Review, he stated that Worldcoin's actions are a form of crypto-colonialism, an experiment based on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, to be imposed on the disadvantaged, essentially because these people cannot fight back .
Pete Howson explained that compared to other forms of data colonialism, the cryptocurrency version is more harmful because the core principle of blockchain, decentralization, means that "when things go wrong, there is very limited accountability." He added:
You’ll often hear the phrase “Do Your Own Research (DYOR)” to pass the buck because these people don’t care much about rules and regulations.
In short, it is cheaper and easier to run such data collection operations in places where people are poor and have little legal protection.
Taken together, Worldcoin's actions demonstrate a conflict of interest between the pursuit of commercial interests and the realization of ideals. While they claim to provide financial opportunity to low-income regions, in practice they exploit information gaps and social vulnerabilities in these regions with deceptive marketing tactics to collect personal data and implement data colonialism.
The practice has raised concerns about privacy and protection of personal data, especially in regions that lack legal protections. At the same time, due to the decentralized nature of blockchain, accountability is difficult, and cryptocurrency projects are often indifferent to rules and regulations. Worldcoin’s brilliance has been constantly exaggerated, but the dark side behind it was little known until reports and investigations by MIT Technology Review.
