Crypto project
Worldcoin has four million downloads
The undated handout from Tools for Humanity GmbH shows an iris scanner from Worldcoin (Orb). photo
© Christoffer Dalkarls/Worldcoin/Orb/Tools for Humanity/dpa
Sam Altman is best known as the head of the ChatGPT provider OpenAI. But he is also a co-founder of the controversial crypto project Worldcoin, which is viewed critically by data protection advocates.
OpenAI boss Sam Altman’s crypto project Worldcoin is being used by more and more people worldwide, despite warnings from politicians. The project’s smartphone app has exceeded the threshold of 4 million downloads in the Apple and Google app stores, announced on Wednesday the Erlangen company Tools for Humanity (TFH), which developed and operates the World app. TFH GmbH, which was founded by Altman and German computer scientist Alex Blania, also has offices in San Francisco and Berlin.
The core idea of the project is to issue a digital ID card in order to be able to prove beyond doubt that the holders are actually human beings – and not – in times of artificial intelligence on the internet Software robots. Worldcoin also aims to distribute a new digital token free of charge to everyone in the world to enable them to access and participate in the global economy.
Although THT does not collect any other personal data such as name, birthday and address, the WorldID concept was met with great mistrust by politicians and authorities. From a data protection perspective, the system should be rejected as a dystopian project, said Bundestag member Misbah Khan (Greens). The Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision and the banking regulator Bafin announced investigations. Results are not yet available.
However, the warnings about Worlcoin do not deter many interested parties from having their eyes scanned, for example in an electronics market on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. The number of monthly active users has increased to more than 1 million in the past six months. The app has more than 100,000 active users every day and more than 500,000 active users every week. Currently, users are primarily motivated to log into the app by distributions of Worldcoin tokens.
TFH manager Tiago Sada defended the decision to rely on an iris scan at WorldID. More than half of people worldwide did not have an ID card. “Not only in many emerging countries, but also in countries like the USA, many people do not have ID cards, especially none that can be digitally verified,” Sada told the German Press Agency. Iris biometrics, on the other hand, has the potential to reliably distinguish ten billion people. This is therefore a suitable method for making distributions of values in the sense of an unconditional basic income, for example, without outsmarting the system. TFT does not store the images of the iris, but only an ID generated from them. Therefore, data protection is guaranteed.