Kenya suspends Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning crypto project
theverge.com
theverge.com
On its no-pun-intended face.
Let's be clear, it does not matter at ALL if Sam Altman or anyone presently involved has good intentions; the goal is biometric crypto, and biometrics -- which is to say, unalienable IDs, is by default an awful idea and should probably be dismissed outright.
But in this case the comparison doesn't really work. If Bob went to a new town he could introduce himself as Dave and no-one would be any the wiser.
By comparison eyeball scans are owned by a private company, infinitely replicable and reusable. They could follow you absolutely everywhere you go without your permission.
Your eyeballs are scanned now everyone will think you are Bob, even if you actually are Dave, because that’s what the app says. Doesn’t matter what you say or argue because the app says you are Bob and the app is never wrong.
I was at Walmart buying some heavily discounted gel blasters. I ordered them for pickup originally but then thought “Walmart employee will misplace it “accidentally” and then buy it when the shift is over” (it happens, a lot). As such, I decide to go myself and pick them up. Turns out Walmart online vs in store clearance price is a big difference so I ask for a price adjustment at the register. I wait for the super user trainer expert person who then calls more super expert backup. They proceed to explain to me that they could do a price adjustment but the app says there are none in stock. Mind you I have the blasters right there at the register and explain to them that these products actually are in stock and say “can we all agree that we are all seeing the same thing right here?”
Answer: sorry, no because again the app says it’s not in stock and we no longer have that product.
The app says no and what the app says is final. Dammit. You are Bob and these gel blasters in front of us don’t exist. Goodluck Bob.
Sorry sir, your eye has been revoked, you can no longer authenticate to this, or any of our partner services.
I know that HN is crawling with individual-responsibility people. To those people I say: do you shrug coldly when your aged mothers get scammed? Are villages without electricity fair game?
Scale brings trust problems. Got a million people in your city? Even without technology, you probably don't know Bob. Bob can rip you off without realistically expecting repercussions, unlike in a small village where everyone depends on each other, and Bob would get kicked out and have to try to find somewhere else. So scale also breaks a lot of the value of permenant IDs, and things like outsourced trust (credit reports, etc) will never be perfect. And in a big society, even a 99% success rate would be A LOT of people getting fucked over.
Can this eyeball-thing fix that? Largely, no - any errors in the system that aren't identity theft will still be there. And potentially worse: even fancy technological systems are almost always vulnerable to technological exploits. And then if too much trust is placed in the validation mechanism, a bad actor could potentially go nuts.
Sure, it could be abused. But literally everything has the potential to be abused. Life is about weighing the risks of abuse against the reward of opportunity. And honestly I think we've gotten really bad at assessing that risk in the past half century, with powerful individuals muddying our perception even further to pursue their own goals.
> Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-seeing...
Interesting. That makes me wonder if cultures around the world feared twins precisely due to the fact that ''unalienable ids' were the default of human societies'. In 'Things Fall Apart', identical twins are automatically 'dispatched' in the evil forest as soon as they are born because they are deemed 'evil'. I never understood why. But since identical twins break the natural default id system of human societies, maybe some societies felt it better to sacrifice the few to preserve the system.
Edit: the down v00ter clearly doesn't understand how African countries work (China has made inroads as well as they have because of bribes). This is the reality on the ground whether you like it or not.
I noticed you casually implied people familiar African countries wouldn't dare down vote your comment. Take this exotic downvote[1], it is straight out of Africa.
1. for lowering quality of discourse with a speculative, off topic shallow dismissal
Edit: if you want me to reverse the downvote, you know "how things work" :) Paypal deets are on my HN profile
Mine was so low I can’t buy a drink via WeChat
So the cancer didn't pay the right officials to disable Kenya's immune response. Good news!
Could they change your retina? Maybe some surgery exists to do this, but it sounds risky/complicated!
That is, the thought experiment here is not that people interact with your retina identity, but with an address that has been confirmed to be associated with a living person. There will have to be ways to build "collective" groups in this landscape, as such there will have to be other webs of trust on top of it. Right?
To be clear, I'm not convinced world coin is a good idea, but I'm not sure this is a clear take down of it?
They were also, by law, not an identifier, because people then were smarter than people now. You can still refuse to give your SSN under any circumstance other than employment, and people cannot deny service based on that refusal.
Which is to say, we could undo that database if we wanted to. If society decided it collectively hated SSNs, the work to obscure that system, or to poison that well, would be far easier than with irises.
I had to do a quick check on this TSA scan just to confirm that an opt out was possible, seems they changed the language back in 2015 https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy... (page 3) to make it less optional. Basically it sounds like you can say NO, but they can override your NO for whatever reason..
"TSA is updating the AIT PIA to reflect a change to the operating protocol regarding the ability of individuals to opt out of AIT screening in favor of physical screening. While passengers may generally decline AIT screening in favor of physical screening, TSA may direct mandatory AIT screening for some passengers as warranted by security considerations in order to safeguard transportation security."
I have never done more than metal detector or massage, and have been 1K flier.
A friend flies with no ID and a federal ankle bracelet. Also opts out of full body scan.
A motivated person could set up an LLC and do everything through that EIN. But few are motivated to protect their privacy.
There are plenty of people who don't care about privacy (as evidenced by the rise of social media). Why wouldn't such people be allowed to profit off their biometric data?
And legalize selling kidneys. My body my choice.
> The company has so far amassed over 100,000 users globally already, and aims to hit the 1 billion user milestone by 2023.
August 2023,
> Worldcoin says over 2 million people have already signed up
"We don't store your biometric data, just a number in one-to-one correspondence with it that anyone with access to our algorithm could reproduce..."
Converting an image to a template requires similar images to result in similar templates. That's usually the opposite of what you want from a hash. There is a concept of "biometric hashing" that would accomplish the one-way claim, but it's theoretically hard and as far as I know none have hit the accuracy levels to make the biometric part feasible for a large scale systems.[1]
The real claim biometrics vendors tend to make if you push them is that you can't reconstruct a photo-realistic image of the face / finger / iris from the template. Which is generally not a true claim either, but at least would require some work with generative tech. And a photorealistic image that generates the same template is likely to look a lot like the actual person.
Source - 10 years of consulting in biometrics for government, academia, and industry, including spoofing and vulnerability assessments. Most people in the industry don't know what they are talking about and just repeat marketing claims.
[1]https://www.cse.unr.edu/~bebis/CS790Q/PaperPresentations/Bio...
Biometrics do freak people out more than tracking cookies do, largely because they represent your actual body (e.g. this article refers to an IR photograph of your iris as an "eyeball scan" because it gives the reader a more visceral reaction - "eyeball" makes you think of something wet and biological, and "scan" sounds invasive and like it involves lasers or something.).
But they can solve some serious technology difficulties in places where other identity infrastructure isn't in place, and often the concerns are a bit philosophical compared to the tangible benefits. As with all privacy-invasive tech, the issue is exposure to rare but nasty failure modes, and biometrics has the difficulty of being non-revokable.
This sounds like something that should have happened in 2020/21.
It of course, already exists, and is very successful in Africa. But SV innovators don't have a piece of it so better make up some BS and drown out any practical voice with media click-bait about eyeballs.
Never understood why Visa and Mastercard (or its members) never turned on the stored value (“offline credit”) portions of the spec.
Plenty of retailers that just “go dark” when the payment/telco network goes down. But maybe that’s an IT issue/decision.
(At least that’s how I think it works: the card keeps track of how many unsigned offline transactions have happened and eventually says “no more” until it gets a ping back from the payment network)
The only thing that is stored is the hash. It’s just a “human or not” database
That’s a whole hearted no thank you from me. I should not be required to scan my retina just to login to my email.
Are you possibly mixing your eviltech? WEI is the replacement for captcha. This is the replacement for identity providers.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22557715/worldcoin-sam-altman-cry...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wants-...
I had personally no idea that any of Altman’s companies was involved in dystopian stuff like this, but it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, as I’ve said before and I’ll say it again that from my point of view Altman (and guys like him) are merely frontmen for 3-letter US security agencies.
And how will cheating be stopped at that time? Shrug
> Worldcoin says over 2 million people have already signed up
> Rest of World also notes that “relatively few people were familiar with the goals of the project” and were instead looking to get the $50 reward.
Some key notes.
Im actually fine with this as long as they're a startup with robust security processes/audits AND acknowledge the impact giving away free money has on the efficacy of their early user numbers.
Honestly I was impressed with how brazen this entire thing is - they might have well just paid for eyeball scans and cut the crypto crap.
Did you read the whitepaper?
Dream bigger! This biometric information is valuable, it can be sold or licensed to (current or future) identity companies, or included as part of a Palantir/Anduril/$Tolkien_Noun border security or intelligence services sold to governments all over the world. I'm sure the CIA & secret-police-types would love getting access to this data once they have a larger dataset (6 to 7 digits)
In the US, what incorporates the existence of federal government power is that there is somebody to mandate it, and this is represented by capital/property/enforcement/vote. Those that are enfranchised with property (like money) are legally recognized as invested in upholding the agreement of union: then the law, and hence their stake, survives. You’re trusted to do business, run for office, make new laws, etc. You can make systems that persist or harden the fairness of a law.
By enfranchising people worldwide, you’re giving them a stake. Enforcement, however, is the hard part. Is this coin rigorous enough? Is it stable? What’s the jurisdiction?
The people with the lowest morals always seem to target the weakest, targeting older people is another common target for these scammers.