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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