A week ago Sam Altman, a technocrat, announced to launch a Worldcoin which will be available for free in exchange for an eye scan of your retina.
The company, which already boasts a $1 billion valuation, is giving away free coins to anyone who scans their eyes on a device that converts the image of their eyes into a “short numeric code” for authentication in exchange for coins.
Privacy advocate Edward Snowden, who leaked hundreds of government documents, has a lot of issues with the concept. Snowden took to Twitter to voice his concerns about Worldcoin.
In a tweet to his 5 million followers, Snowden protested his problems with Worldcoin: the use of human bodies for crypto.
Snowden tweeted, “This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people’s iris scans (for “fairness”), and waves away the implications by saying we deleted the scans!’.”
He further added, “Indeed, Worldcoin says the original image of each user’s eyes will not need to be stored or uploaded. But You save the hashes produced by the scans. Hashes that match future scans. Don’t catalogue eyeballs.”
Many Crypto Twitter users have mocked Worldcoin in social media, including predicting that biometric information will leak and be sold online.
Worldcoin must hope the promise of free crypto is enough to dissuade those concerned that data could fall into the hands of third parties.
