Sam Altman's Worldcoin rebrands as project broadens | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman's Worldcoin rebrands as project broadens

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14 pointsrtg48699 comments

Can you trademark a generic word like "World"?? I should hope not.

And nope you're not scanning my eyeballs.

I absolutely don't want to have a centralised identity online. In fact I have many identities and I like to keep it that way. I'm never going to cooperate with this.

I was at a US airport recently where TSA is piloting some sort of facial scanning (facial recognition? retina?). People have the option to refuse, but everyone I saw seemed to comply without a thought.

Unless we talk about privacy, why would they do otherwise?

Unless privacy is enforced via legislation -- something that seems tremendously unlikely -- I don't think we will have any; data brokers are out of control.

There will be no legislation if we don't educate people and advocate for it.

> something that seems tremendously unlikely

People keep saying those things rather than doing anything. The other side couldn't be happier than to read that.

The EU is surely working on that. They're getting a lot of flak for the cookie walls and AI legislation. But the cookie walls were because they gave the industry too much leeway. They should have mandated that the DNT flag be respected and there would have been no issue. Just set the flag (even set by default is fine because tracking must be opt out) and you're done with tracking forever. But they had to kowtow to the industry. And get the flak for the result.

And for the AI rules it's precisely to prevent another status quo that's hard to turn back once it happened like the ad tracking.

They should get flak for ruining every website. What use are good intentions when the implementation is trash?

Yeah I hope they'll learn from this next time and not let the ad industry back them into a corner that is bad for everyone.

The problem is that it's now an industry where billions revolve. They're constantly lobbying against real limitations. The best thing for society would have been if this adtech surveillance industry had never been created. This is why I'm so happy that they are trying to avoid the same thing happening with AI. "Just sit back and see where we end up" is something that really backfired before.

The problem with privacy is that it's too late by the time harm occurs, but prior to that, there are too many other immediate issues on people plate to care.

What solutions do you propose?

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