[kictanet] World coin collecting biometrics of Kenyans

Wed Nov 16 11:47:35 EAT 2022

Thanks Kivuva for bringing this to our attention, and thanks Linda for
sharing the insightful article. I must say it is very worrying as Worldcoin
has collected alot of data. What are they planning to do with it? Can this
data give them access to say peoples health records, bank accounts etc.?
And do they expect us to believe the below statement?

*Worldcoin says that once its systems are perfected, it will anonymize and
delete users’ biometric data, thereby guaranteeing their privacy. But the
company still has not committed to a timeline, even though it has captured
and stored almost a half million iris scans to train its algorithms.*

On Wed, Nov 16, 2022 at 10:24 AM Linda Bonyo via KICTANet <
kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:

> Thanks Mwendwa,
>
> Buzzfeed did a great job investigating this in May this year. They quoted
> the data commissioner in this article  that’s worth reading.
>
>
> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems
>
> Regards.
> Linda Bonyo
>
> On Tue, 15 Nov 2022 at 18:25, Mwendwa Kivuva via KICTANet <
> kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:
>
>> Have you heard of World Coin? What is the value of your iris scan? World
>> Coin scans the iris of the public in exchange of the WorldCoin
>> cryptocurrency. I came across them at Sarit Center today. Is this legal?
>> Has Kenyan government and Office of the Data Protection Commissioner given
>> then the go ahead to mass scan the biometrics of Kenyans?
>>
>> According to the project’s team, around 30 orbs that can scan people’s
>> eyes and create a unique identifier are located all across the world.
>> Worldcoin orbs can be found in France, Sudan, Indonesia, Kenya, and Chile.
>> Worldcoin’s orbs are maintained by “Orb Operators” who get rewarded for
>> soliciting potential Worldcoin participants. Depending on when the person
>> got in on the project, token recipients can get between $10 and $200 worth
>> of the digital asset worldcoin (WC).
>>
>> The popular whistleblower Edward Snowden scorned Sam Altman’s Worldcoin
>> intro tweet as well. “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,’” Snowden said. “Yeah, but you save the
>> *hashes* produced by the scans. Hashes that match *future* scans. Don’t
>> catalogue eyeballs,” Snowden added.
>>
>>
>> https://news.bitcoin.com/iris-scanning-worldcoin-idea-fuels-objections-from-privacy-advocates-snowden-says-dont-catalog-eyeballs/
>>
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