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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Who are the victims here? The people who voluntarily had their iris scanned?

Yes. People also voluntarily give up their civil rights and are duped into unreasonable debts. How often do you read the ToS for most of the services you consume? Consumer protections operate in the understanding that people cannot be expected to know the intricacies of all the various laws and agreements that may negatively impact them should they agree to terms when consuming a good or service.

How were they harmed by this? And why shouldn't people be free to voluntarily share a scan of their iris with other people?

Apologies for butting in, but I don't think you are arguing in good faith here.

How about we change the angle a bit: why do you think this happened in Kenya and not in Germany?

I believe Worldcoin is live in Germany. Also, it’s kind of unreasonable to expect a startup to pull off a global launch without a hitch. Assuming good faith, I suspect issues will be resolved over time.

Yes, that's entirely why they've gone into mostly developing countries (I'd think it'd be easier for a startup to pull of a global launch focusing on more developed countries, for a variety of reasons) offering people almost a week's salary to have their eyeball scanned (Kenya's average monthly salary is USD$420, and Worldcoin was offering effectively $70 to sign up).

Two EU countries are already investigating them (France and Germany).

> Assuming good faith

The tech industry in general lost the "benefit of the doubt" years ago. That's not WC's fault, but WC could have mitigated some of that if they at least put some effort into not appearing shady.

Particularly since they're connected to cryptocurrency, which is one of the scummier segments of the industry to begin with.

To be clear, I don't personally endorse Worldcoin and am not an investor, nor do I have particular admiration for Sam Altman. I just fundamentally question the notion of "victimless" crimes. In my view, consensual transactions between adults shouldn't be illegal and it seems to me that this is what is occurring here. As to why this is happening in Kenya, I wouldn't be surprised if they failed to "persuade" the right bureaucrats (a problem that many African entrepreneurs face[0]). According to Reuters, Worldcoin is currently "orbing" in 20 countries by the way[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqD3QbzSsIs

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-sam-altman-launch...

At one point in the 70s, the Indian government started offering people money to voluntarily get sterilized. These people didn’t have a free choice in the matter, their situation in life compelled them, in this particular case financially. It’s not an infringement of someone’s freedom, rather an exploitation of the poor situation that individual is already in.

Why call this situation an "exploitation" when all parties involved are better off from the transaction? And if it is truly a "life or death" situation, how is it moral to ban a life saving option?

If Kenyans are getting life-saving money in exchange for their iris scan, how is banning this arrangement helping them? Aren't they in a better position than you, or government bureaucrats, to judge what is best for them?

I think it's entirely possible that the random opinion of a person who is not involved, nor a resident of the country in question may not need to supersede what is possibly an informed decision on the part of Kenyan officials. While it's fashionable to assume non-Anglo countries operate exclusively within the context of corruption and ignorance, Kenya has the right to secure its own values over the hopes and dreams of Silicon Valley.

If WeChat required iris scans to work, would the Chinese "voluntarily" be doing it?

I'm specifically making this example about WeChat because it's basically impossible to exist in China without it and has the power imbalances inherent in dealing with the CCP that make it "voluntary" the same way donating money to someone with a gun pointed at your chest is "voluntary", since libertarians have a deliberately extremely warped view of that word.

Did Kenyans have a comparable metaphorical "gun pointed at their chest" when they signed up for Worldcoin?

Is "a comparable 'gun pointed at their chest'" your minimum required threshold for conceding that when people are tricked into an arrangement that harms them long-term, they consented without all relevant information to make a decision? (Libertarians also have this thing where they think obscuring information and getting what they want out of someone counts as informed consent because it absolves them of guilt later when their 'business partners' find themselves in financial ruin 'of their own accord'....)

Because as I understand it, they were offered a carrot of $70USD for signing up.

How were they tricked and how is it going to harm them long term? What do you know that they don't?

Personally, if I had to pick a side, I'd say Worldcoin investors are the suckers in this transaction.

I don't know why WorldCoin specifically wanted specifically iris scans, but I know that companies frequently toe the line when it comes to the law, and step over it if the fines are small enough, and that they're data-hungry. Facebook + Cambridge Analytica + election eruption. Github + Copilot. Stable Diffusion + "AI art". LLM + Reddit and other websites making moves towards a closed internet to avoid scraping. Just because the data collection wasn't valuable at the time it was collected, doesn't mean it didn't become so after a critical threshold. These trends monetarily benefit a few people, and the rest of us get enshittification.

Just because iris data may not be valuable today, doesn't mean it won't be insanely valuable in the future, but it does practically guarantee that benefits won't be shared equitably. Remember Henrietta Lacks? Her family only just reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher this month. How much money does TFS make, how much are HeLa cells worth, and how much did the Lacks estate end up getting?

If iris scans are so irrelevant, then why did WorldCoin flat out ignore Kenya's order to stop collecting that information for months? Shouldn't a bunch of geniuses work there - they could make their code compliant if they wanted to. So why did they keep collecting?

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