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Edward Snowden Expresses Concerns with Worldcoin Orb Iris Scans

2 mins
Updated by Kyle Baird
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In Brief

  • Snowden tweeted that eyeballs shouldn’t be cataloged.
  • He criticized the effort, saying that it has several implications.
  • Privacy is a hot concern in an increasingly digital world, with multiple projects working on a varied set of tools and solutions.
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Freedom of the Press Foundation President and whistleblower Edward Snowden has criticized Worldcoin, a decentralized project that stores the iris of people. Snowden tweeted on Oct 24 that the project simply just stores a global database of people’s iris scans, disregarding the potential consequences.

Worldcoin has high ambitions, targeting at least one billion users and the production of 50,000 devices per year. Snowden, however, is clear with his opinion — “don’t catalog eyeballs.” He pointed out that the hashes produced through the scans could be used to match future scans, and therein lies the rub.

Worldcoin skepticism

Worldcoin was first announced by Sam Altman on Oct 21. The project is described as “a new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible.” It aims to distribute these assets fairly by having people prove that they are human and have received their allotment.

It intends to do that through a device called the “Orb,” which captures an image of a person’s eyes and subsequently hashes that data. The announcement does say that the original image will not be stored or uploaded, as it further preserves privacy by not linking the code to the wallet or transactions.

Privacy and centralization remain a problem

The blockchain and cryptocurrency industry has long been held up as a solution to the privacy problem of modern technology. Corporations and governments are gaining an increasing amount of control over people’s lives, and this is largely unavoidable for the common person whose life is deeply entangled with digital services.

To some relief, several projects are working on making transactions and other interactions more private. Zcash and Monero are among the most well-known for transaction-based privacy, but other, more specific use cases also exist. Cryptocurrency platform Beam is aiming to bring privacy to DeFi.

Governments and financial regulators are now taking a stand against privacy coins, given the potential risks associated with them. South Korea has banned this form of crypto, while others are deliberating on regulations to deal with it.

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Rahul Nambiampurath
Rahul Nambiampurath's cryptocurrency journey first began in 2014 when he stumbled upon Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper. With a bachelor's degree in Commerce and an MBA in Finance from Sikkim Manipal University, he was among the few that first recognized the sheer untapped potential of decentralized technologies. Since then, he has helped DeFi platforms like Balancer and Sidus Heroes — a web3 metaverse — as well as CEXs like Bitso (Mexico's biggest) and Overbit to reach new heights with his...
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