It's hard to square that whole thing with the way people talk about him here. But every once in a while it hits; this is the guy who wanted to collect everyone's bloody retina pattern, all for a crypto so obviously bad in nearly every fundamental aspect.
I want to build global apps where I know every user is real and limited to one account but currently that's impossible. I don't know enough about Worldcoin to know if that's it though.
Why instead did they go to some of the least wealthy parts of Africa and ask people to give them their biometrics for sometimes as much as one month's salary? To seed their database? It doesn't really pass the smell test.
But it's a fuckin scam. It's exploitative, and sleazy as fuck. It uses crappy blockchain tech, the orbs are proprietary, and you really ought to think twice before condescending at people who try to help you out on this.
It sucks and the other uses also suck.
Worldcoin stores the biometric data for opt-in users. They say it themselves. It’s stored “encrypted” which means the original data is retrievable, and kept in Worldcoin’s custody. All Worldcoin claims is that it has safeguards against retrieving the data it does collect and store, like say Equifax or 23andme claim about your PII.
That does not follow. It's true if you're using technical terms correctly, but I've absolutely seen companies use encrypted to mean hashed.
I said for the long term project they aren't storing any biometric data. They are doing it now to better train models, but long term it's not something they will gather at all nor need to gather.
The retina scan hashes that are stored are not reversible, at all.