'Verified human': Worldcoin users queue up for iris scans
neuters.de
neuters.de
>Worldcoin is a potential privacy nightmare that offers a biometrics-dependent vision of digital identity and cryptocurrency, and would place Sam Altman’s Tools for Humanity company at the center of digital governance. Worldcoin’s approach creates serious privacy risks by bribing the poorest and most vulnerable people to turn over unchangeable biometrics like iris scans and facial recognition images in exchange for a small payout. Mass collections of biometrics like Worldcoin threaten people’s privacy on a grand scale, both if the company misuses the information it collects, and if that data is stolen. Ultimately, Worldcoin wants to become the default digital ID and a global currency without democratic buy-in at the start, that alone is a compelling reason not to turn over your biometrics, personal information, and geolocation data to a private company. We urge regulatory agencies around the world to closely scrutinize Worldcoin.
https://epic.org/epic-statement-on-privacy-risks-of-worldcoi...
Except for, say, glaucoma, detached retinas, injuries, all sorts of stuff that can impact the eyes.
Sorry, you've been involved in a serious accident, you can no longer get your money!
> To validate the quality of the algorithms at scale, their performance was evaluated by collecting 2.5 million pairs of high-resolution infrared iris images from 303 different subjects. These subjects represent diversity across a range of characteristics, including eye color, skin tone, ethnicity, age, presence of makeup and eye disease or defects.
> It is important to note that many health conditions, like cataracts to a certain degree, do not impede iris biometrics. Already today, iris biometrics surpass the inclusivity of other PoP verification alternatives like official IDs since less than 50% of the global population has digitally verifiable identities. However, if the proof of personhood mechanism becomes essential for society, it is important that eventually every single person can verify if they want to. Although not currently established, there could be specialized verification centers to facilitate alternative means of verification for individuals with eye conditions, via e.g. facial biometrics. The introduction of alternative means of verification for World ID could potentially create loopholes.
There are many cases where those making a problem never fixed anything. In fact too many cases throughout history to enumerate.
- A bunch of personal identifying data including a unique number (which is as much of a secret as my name or my date of birth)
- A bunch of old-timey security stuff like thumbprint and signature
- An RFID chip containing all this info, ICAO 9303 compliant
- A PIN protected certificate that I can use to sign documents digitally
- Several security measures to make falsifying it very hard
Everybody who lives in this country has one of these, and these features are not uncommon for ID cards to have in other countries. It also has the full backing of the state, which means that if I lose it I can easily get a new one, and is very illegal for somebody to use it to impersonate me, or to create a false one.
I'm not sure what advantages I or my fellow citizens would gain by moving to a distributed system in charge of some foreign capitalists who have never even been to this country.
The moment they opened that can of worms, they're on the hook for making it serve, at the minimum, everyone that the current government mechanisms serve.
I'm using eyeless people as an example here, because it's the obvious case of people who can't possibly use Worldcoin even if they wanted to. The direct implication today is that blind people would lose their benefits under Worldcoin. If that's not true, then either.
1. Government doesn't actually need Worldcoin's ideas as much as Worldcoin hopes they do.
2. There are workarounds that don't require Worldcoin, in which case let's just use those in the first place.
'Blind' is a much larger category than 'eyeless', and I think you're making the implicit assumption that the government's current identity verification methods work much better than they really do. Just look at the HN post yesterday about the woman whose identity was stolen and used to import 'counterfeit' goods. Worldcoin's system may not be perfect, but having it as an option might have helped in a case like that.
In normal countries that would mean we could save thousands of lives by warning people without even having to test them. Since denying insurance because of some random data from a data broker is completely illegal in any civilized country.
But I'm not sure how a company such as OpenAI would connect iris data to colon cancer cases. How would they even access iris data? let alone connect iris data to personal identity? I don't see a way of doing that within the Worldcoin framework.
> Your biometric data is first processed locally on the Orb and then permanently deleted. The only data that remains is your IrisCode. This IrisCode is a set of numbers generated by the Orb and is not linked to your wallet or any of your personal information. As a result, it really tells us — and everyone else — nothing about you. All it does is stop you from being able to sign up again.
Which means it tells them something about you.
What about this scheme prevents identification through somebody scanning your iris to get your hash on the pretext of a legitimate purpose, then connecting your hash to your actual identity and passing it on?
This seems like a large risk, considering how many companies exist entirely to compile data from disparate databases into a single record. The existence of those sorts of businesses is why there is no such thing as an anonymous unique identifier.
Also, World ID is anonymous because the service one uses it with does not recieve the ID, not because they recieve the ID without one's real name. In other worlds, you can sign up to a service using at once both World ID and your real name and they will still have no way of connecting your World ID to your real name.
Nah, don't think so, that's the point of zero knowledge proofs
The fallback is probably 2FA. But we already use 2FA.
I'd rather not have my username indelibly linked to my identity. for example, I should be able to delegate to my accountant, or let my kids do stuff on my steam account, etc. Not to mention using an indelible ID that is cross-site, meaning i have to use the same username on all suchlike sites and services. The temptation of having that singular id is so great, it is inevitable it will be known to all — including those corrupt governments who will use it for enhancing their power.
I honestly don't see an upside. Combine this with web attestation and I shudder a bit.
I don't think any such data leaves the Orbs, as far as the Worldcoin system in concerned.
I guess "authentication of unique personhood" would though.
Also, I can presumably regain possession of my World ID credentials by visiting an Orb.
The plan that governments have for resolving the geopolitical and economic problems seems to be WWIII. And then things like WorldCoin, but very poorly implemented, and people already distrust the government so much that those ideas never even reach lawmakers since they know they won't be accepted.
The thing is though that humans may not be able to survive without a truly functional international government. And it also has to integrate with technology since that is ubiquitous now.
There just isn't a way to do it without some kind of identification.
Not trying means we will still descend into a cyberpunk dystopia.
And then after hundreds of millions die in WWIII, we would still end up getting our irises scanned. It would just be administered by the superintelligent Chinese police robots. And we would also all have to learn Chinese and would be subjected to the CCP's social credit system.
I think having a little bit of slop in a human system is good. A world where your freedoms and responsibilities are entirely managed by computers, like an AWS IAM role for people, sounds awful, and this project seems to want to go there.
A generation raised on “contrarian” and “anti-conformist” YouTube influencers is skeptical of democratic power and international institutions, but willing to give a free pass to billionaires and any other kind of power that operates via ruthlessly deployed private property. Worldcoin fits this mold and so it will find fans.
* Skepticism over mass vaccination (as opposed to at-risk groups only). Shut up, anti-vaxer, you're anti-democratic. Backed by Big Pharma.
* Skepticism over climate change policy (asking middle class to reduce expectations, rather than cranking down on planned obsolescence and offshore production). Shut up, climate denier, you're anti-democratic. Backed by the companies doing offshoring and using climate as selling point.
* Skepticism over affirmative action (as in discriminating people based on skin color in Academia, rather than making it easier for ALL parents to teach things to their kids). Shut up, you racist. Backed by the billion-dollar DEI industry billing enormous rates to public institutions.
I can give many more examples where valid skepticism is immediately conflated with the nearest crazy idea nobody actually cares about (like the actual KKK), and is shut down on that basis by those who have a vested interest in not being scrutinized.
All successful vaccination is mass vaccination. That's the whole point. Would we be rid of polio if we'd only vaccinated the 5% of population who were most at risk?
Every infection has an R0 rate (average number of people infected by a single infected person). If it's greater than 1, the infection spreads exponentially. If it's lower than 1, it peters out.
Vaccinating X% of people pushes R0 lower by X * N, where N depends on mutation rate, how good is the vaccine at preventing the spread (vs. reducing symptoms), etc.
R0 is also affected by seasonality, immunity from earlier infections, etc.
Polio doesn't mutate as fast, the vaccine lasts long time, and prevents both symptoms and the spread. R0 drops below 1, polio defeated.
COVID mutates much faster, has one of the highest R0 rates among known diseases, vaccine lasts a limited time, considerably reduces mortality rate (which isn't much of a concern for fit healthy adults under 50), and somewhat reduces the spread. It pushes the R0 number somewhat down, but not below 1.
What actually ended the pandemic was the Omicron variant that mysteriously grew much faster in the upper respiratory tract, and got your body to start fighting it before it did anything to the lungs. It still has enough R0, but the symptoms are so mild, it became mostly indistinguishable from common cold, so people stopped caring.
Had we vaccinated the at-risk groups, and given strong incentives for others to lose weight and start exercising, we could have arrived at the same, or lower death toll with much less taxpayer money going towards the Big Pharma.
It's not good to be knee-jerk skeptical of everything that defined the post-WWII rules-based international system while idolizing billionaire founders and their corporate power. We had some good things figured out by the 1990s. It wasn't the proverbial "end of history" but IMO we need more of the cooperative spirit and respect for human rights that got us there, not less.
Because they have temporarily poor millionaire syndrome.
I’m not sure what the solution is but I’m not sure that shutting down every slightly uncommon opinion is it. (I recognize that this comment is exactly what a savvy troll would say and well I guess that’s kinda part of my point)
There's no "hijacking" occurring except in your mind. Your preferred political tribe also engages in its share of conspiracy-adjacent skepticism.
If AGI is created and then removes the need for any human to work, UBI (or the like) would be essential. You'd want to avoid abuse, so you also need to uniquely verify each person receiving it. I don't think the people involved in this are ignorant to the concerns, they just see it as inevitable based on their ideas about the future.
> The orb was necessary, the website continued, because of Worldcoin’s commitment to fairness: each person should get his or her allotted share of the digital currency—and no more. To ensure there was no double-dipping, the chrome orb would scan participants’ irises and several other biometric data points and then, using a proprietary algorithm that the company was still developing, cryptographically confirm that they were human and unique in Worldcoin’s database.
> “I’ve been very interested in things like universal basic income and what’s going to happen to global wealth redistribution,” Sam Altman, Worldcoin’s cofounder and the former President of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, told Bloomberg, which first reported on the company last summer. Worldcoin was intended, he explained, to answer the question “Is there a way we can use technology to do that at a global scale?”
A common response from Altman when asked about the benefits of AGI is "I think eliminating poverty is good". This is what he's talking about.
Of course, this redistribution doesn't apply to him, early employees, or investors:
> Others took issue with the company’s purported focus on fairness given that 20% of the coins had already been allocated: 10% to Worldcoin’s full-time employees, and another 10% to investors, like Andreessen Horowitz.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
Spoofing irises seems well within the realm of a sophisticated AI.
(I don't agree with this, but it's a common perspective amongst this crowd).
It makes me think at some point we'll be back to inventing government-issued IDs. Or um using the ones we have.
Only if you think that capitalism and magic generative machines are compatible in any way. The need for UBI would only make sense if only certain classes of individuals can utilize AGI and others need to purchase their produce. How does such a world make sense, and why would anyone want to live in it? If a post-scarcity machine exists, why would tokens of scarcity need to exist - money - alongside it? Sounds like serfdom on easy-mode.
This is part of that mindset. The idea of AGI being freely available is horrifying to x-riskers. The idea of it not existing is also just not possible. So they want to see it in the hands of as few people as possible.
Also, not everyone is going to accept UBI as a substitute for labor. We already see artists complaining specifically that AI art takes away the fun part of the job. The entire LessWrong/EA memeplex[1] assumes that the benefits of AI will be so obvious that humanity will tolerate the imposition of a new technological priesthood responsible for aligning AI to humanity's collective interests. Worship us and we will make Star Trek a documentary. This is like if you took all the worst parts of Christianity and all the worst parts of authoritarian Soviet Communism and mashed them up in a blender.
[0] Bracing for the inevitable UHM ACKTUALLY comments about ballot stuffing in third world countries
[1] Short for MEME comPLEX. A series of ideas that tend to be adopted together because they are self-reinforcing.
So I can understand why you'd want to circumvent them. But in the end, we do need government, and circumventing them just means eventually needing to re-create them.
Which leads to the question: Do we fix the governments we have, or create new ones?
It seems analagous to the rewrite-from-scratch fallacy. In the end, I can't see any way around fixing the world's governments. Educating the electorate, structural reform, all of it.
So yeah. Currency and UBI seem like functions of governments to me too.
Why?
What you're describing is a post-scarcity world. In that context, what does "abuse" even mean?
(And, to be clear: I'm sharing their perspective, not mine).
Satoshi Nakamoto made a compromise by mining a fortune of easy bitcoin, then not touching it. A weak compromise, because the moment they use some of those coins, bitcoin will have one of its greatest crisis of trust.
https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia/status/165906095074878259...
This whole project is creepy and disgusting.
The project is creepy but the scammers stealing others from their fair share are just downright evil people.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/12/hackers-stole-passwords-of...
2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30931614
2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998065
2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947468
Don't have any big thought provoking comments other than the fact this makes me feel a bit more sadder :(
... Its just me, or it sounds ironic?
As for privacy I don't see a big problem as for most online services I don't want to actually be anonymous towards the service provider, just towards the general web, and the online services should respect that according to the GDPR
That doesn't sound like proof-of-personhood, it sounds like proof-of-identity.
Although in classic Italian style now that a solid % of the population has it they’re considering switching to a new, worse, system that relies on the new ID card paired with either an NFC or a card reader.
"Fingerprints:The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science" by Colin Beavan
The overall book is excellent and good balance of the science and history wrapped around an interesting murder case.
The part of the book that felt most apropos to this HN comment thread is this:
In the 1800's there were multiple countries with large populations (by 1800s standards0 where a majority of the population had essentially zero identity documents. This made it trivial for criminals to commit a crime, get caught, move to a different region and commit the exact same crime over and over again.
On the flip side, the book highlights a case where an innocent person is charged with a crime due to a passing resemblance to a criminal. There was no way to prove the innocent person was NOT the criminal and therefore the charge stood.
The goal of bringing this up isn't to say "100% we need digital ID!" but rather to help provide some balance to a discussion on the pros and cons of having "an identity" that is easily verifiable.
Sure everything seems nice now, but when they force all to be part of the network, or else, then they have even further control, possibly total control.
So it's not something to tread into lightly. Make sure the means of technological progress is in the hands of the user, not outside powers. This means crypto(graphy)(includes crypto currency, but also DID, etc.), it means running AI locally rather than in the cloud, it means even things as simple as hydroponics in the home and in public spaces.
At the end of the day, technological advancement is a fine line between beneficial progress and absolute tyranny at this stage.
He seems to be actively working to bring about a very dystopian future in a way that Zuckerberg or Gates never did.
that's a one time payment of 57$
In other words, the malicious actions from data predators (FAANG et al.) and the negligence from governments and regulators to protect the public have led individuals to learned helplessness. It's a dire and depressing situation. The bad guys have won, and people don't have the means or knowledge to fight back. That's why I donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and similar orgs. It's the only way to show the middle finger to the bad guys.
> Ali, a 22-year-old chemical engineering student... (...) "I told my brother about it this morning. I told him 'it's free money, you want to come with me to get it?'"
I wonder what you can get people to do with the promise of money? Could you have them play Russian roulette? How many people would accept? If there was a way to make it seem real and convincing (without being real of course!) it would be a fascinating experiment.
Now with Worldcoin, Sam is selling the solution (proof-of-personhood) to the problem he created with ChatGPT (AI spam, deep fakes, etc) and could be easily working with those same governments who would have always wanted to get people to sleep-walk into handing over their digital identity.
The main difference? Worldcoin is doing it all out in the open.
Sam is actually worse than Zuckerberg.
And how does this work if you only have one eye?
TL;DR there isn’t a way to connect biometrics to key pairs unless the key pairs are generated using biometrics (very insecure) or the orb attests that they are unique from a hardware signature to Worldcoin (which means Worldcoin is a central issuer of identity and controls global identity).
If you want to read more I wrote on HN a few months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35457769
There must be another way.
But, if I already have someone's biometrics for some other purpose, I presume I can use that to pretend to be them? It just seems like an inconvenient password you can't change.
Governments are now taking notes on how to perform a perfect rollout of a CBDC without alarming the masses with its dystopian drawbacks or the so-called 'conspiracy theorists' discovering their plans and leaking it before it launches.
Given that Worldcoin was essentially out there in the open, it was already too late to even begin to stop them. Especially when Sam Altman has been talking to governments about both creating the poison (ChatGPT/AI fakes) and selling the cure / solution (Worldcoin).
You are watching the creation of another 'personhood' data broker / collector using an Orb to verify / KYC people and give them free money. Something that would make governments and three letter agencies incredibly jealous.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/china-uses-digita...