Cybersecurity expert Edward Snowden, who rose to fame after exposing the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program, talked about the cryptocurrency Worldcoin, also co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The famous whistleblower criticized the project to create a global hash database of people’s eye scans, arguing that simply deleting the data did not solve the problem.
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!”
Yeah, but you save the *hashes* produced by the scans. Hashes that match *future* scans.
Don’t catalog eyeballs. https://t.co/uAk0NYGeZu
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 23, 2021
Snowden urges his followers not to use their biometric data for anything, adding that the human body is not “a ticket punch.”
The highly exaggerated distribution model of the cryptocurrency is based on scanning people’s eyeballs with the help of a chromatic sphere called “The Orb”. The devices allow users to register by scanning their eyes. The encrypted image is then turned into a unique code and the original data is erased to ensure confidentiality. 130,000 people have participated in the project so far.
Backed by Andreessen Horowitz and other prominent investors, the WorldCoin project has drawn the ire of privacy-conscious members of the cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin community has criticized VCs for pouring money into a “creepy globe” rather than focusing on building the biggest cryptocurrency ecosystem:
VCs will literally create a creepy orb WorldCoin rather than build on Bitcoin.
— Brandon Quittem (@Bquittem) October 23, 2021
Altman defended the social experiment after Snowden’s comments, claiming that users’ transactions would be cryptographically separated from the hash.
The controversial WorldCoin cryptocurrency is said to be launched as an ERC20 token in early 2022.