German watchdog orders Sam Altman's biometric ID project World to delete data
euronews.com
euronews.com
World(coin) sounds like it's right out of the plot of some Sunday morning preacher's sermons [1] about Revelations and the "mark of the Beast".
Central organization scanning people and controlling how they transact? Literally the antichrist's M.O.
Borders, passports, IDs, personal documentation, it's all just a modern caste system. Yes, it's uncomfortable to think of a world without them but to me, after global warming, digital class slavery is probably the second biggest issue of our time. So much of the world works because bureaucracy is inefficient and non-omniciant, just like humans, yet so many people want the world to be one big TSA checkpoint where everyone must be unnaturally perfect at all times. It's utopian thinking that is leading us towards a type of hell I don't think any of us can even begin to imagine.
I'll give you modern KYC stuff is annoying - it seems you have to provide proof of identity, address where you live, and often now where your money came from which can be tricky if you haven't documented it.
Worldcoin is actually a step away from the KYC situation where you can prove you are a unique person but not have to give them your name address and finances etc. But so far that's a bit theoretical - all the financial institutions I deal with want KYC stuff and don't accept Worldcoin.
If it was down to me I'd have fairly free travel within the developed world - say EU, UK, USA, maybe Japan, and limited term work permits for people coming from less well off countries.
If some people are not aware of ZKP here is a short really like [1].
However, they are collecting iris scans which means they are the ones building the set and therefore own all the data about all the members of that set.
To do it properly the government should be the ones who build the set.
There are also problems with respect to stolen identities. If addressed, it's not fully private - you are given a token which you must reuse, making you pseudonymous. Or else a single stolen identity may be used infinitely without anyone realizing it.
>However, they are collecting iris scans which means they are the ones building the set and therefore own all the data about all the members of that set.
Totally agree, but any other official of any kind can do the same and create their own membership set. A mayor of a town can create a similar set of citizens. A football's team coach can create their own membership set, of players and fans.
I don't see why that particular membership set is more special than any other.
> To do it properly the government should be the ones who build the set.
To do it properly governments around the world should agree on a standard or two, and use that standard worldwide for the next 50 to 100 years. See for example screws and screwdrivers [1] which are effectively identical for so many years.
When a standard is established for identity, for ownership, for ownership transactions, for signatures, for contracts, for passports and many other things then it is government's job to keep the data safe and private, we agree on that. As soon as identities for example are a technological screw, then we don't want incompatibilities between governments.
> There are also problems with respect to stolen identities.
The ZKP does not need to be the identity by itself. Another identity can be tied to the ZKP proof, and use it's children identities for everyday use. They implemented something like that for Python to avoid supply chain attacks [2].
Which is exactly what I said:
> you are given a token which you must reuse, making you pseudonymous
The way it's usually done with ZKP's is through the use of a nullifier, a cryptographic product of hidden information which will always be static. In this case the nullifier may be a public key.
The second part is once you have an account you can use it to prove you are the person with that account, and this is probably where the zero knowledge proofs come in. In this second stage your irises are irrelevant, they only come up when first applying.
The accounts are very much like crypto wallet public/private key accounts I think although they try to hide the details from you a bit in the app.
What do they mean by "Zurich" here?
https://www.lda.bayern.de/media/pm/pm2024_08_en.pdf (EN)
https://www.lda.bayern.de/media/pm/pm2024_08.pdf (DE)
Quote from the officlal English version:
> As a result, despite the improvements already introduced, adjustments are still required to bring the company's data processing in line with the applicable provisions Among other things, the company will be obliged to provide a deletion procedure that complies with the provisions of the GDPR within one month of the decision taking effect. In addition, “Worldcoin” will be obliged to provide explicit consent for certain processing steps in the future. Moreover, the deletion of certain data records previously collected without a sufficient legal basis was ordered ex officio. The company has already received the decision and has informed us that it is going to appeal it.
The allusion to "improvements already introduced" would seem to refer (though I'm uncertain of this) to https://world.org/blog/announcements/worldcoin-foundation-un... - which was described there as "reinforced after conversations with data protection authorities focused around further biometric template protection, particularly the Bavarian Data Protection Authority (“BayLDA”), the Worldcoin Foundation’s Lead Supervisory Authority in the EU."
Cryptographic systems that ensure no single party can access data at rest, even if that party were to be compromised, corrupted, or forced to reveal secrets by law enforcement, are absolutely incredible technical achievements - but it seems that, at least in this case, they are insufficient solutions in the eyes of EU regulators. (Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
I hope the stance towards cryptographic erasure evolves thoughtfully over time in general, but World's approach here, beginning to collect data for seemingly unlimited purposes before having a completed system for SMPC, was never going to be one that would lend itself towards establishing positive regulatory precedent.
Our approach would be to add some filters into our 'restore' pipeline which drops the problematic data should we ever attempt a restore, but I don't think it's good enough, and we have to maintain a list of user id hashes or such to power the filters.
Edit: I mean, in a way that won't eat a lot of costs. I can imagine a malicious group opening and demanding deletions for 1000s of users which would mean a deletion job running on a large number of these 20TB backups, say 100 daily backups and for multiple users?
You may even be okay to just reply to the user that you've deleted all active copies of the data and it'll be fully gone when your backups expire in 30 days.
IANAL tho.
I am not aware of any provision within GDPR that allows anyone else but the individual person (and courts) to request deletion of their personal data. So I think your example is highly unlikely to ever happen.
We have automated systems to deal with requests in that category, it would probably have to be in the double-digit percentage of our customer base before we see any significant impact on our ability to conduct business.
We know which dat belongs to which customer, we know which data we must delete if requested, we know which data (eg invoice related for bookkeeping) we must keep even if requested to delete personal data.
If we ever piss off such a large portion of our customers, that they want to delete their accounts, GDPR-related requests will be the least of our concern.
Which does seem weird… but to be fair, it would be near impossible to delete from backups as they exist today, it would be a law that can’t be practically applied.
My guess is that most places go with not taking any active steps to delete things from the backups themselves, counting on media rotation to eventually overwrite the data. When restoring they omit anything that is on the "should be deleted" list.
- Rotate old tapes to store the freshest backup (according to retention policy)
- Store row ID for each deletion request
- Replay deletions during restore
Either way you want (or already have) a scrubbing procedure to import production data into a staging environment, so this is not a technical issue.
I mean, sure, it's very theoretical, you can't prove that Meta or Google doesn't delete your data until a leak.
The file locker site i use said my account was deactivated due to inactivity.
But after a simple email pw reset all my uploads are back online.
Makes me aware any deletion i do is probably NOT done server side.