It’s beyond laughable that the company didn’t better address these concerns beyond performative press releases without the need for regulatory intervention before rolling out in any jurisdiction, let alone the EU. Whatever one’s opinion on the privacy implications, it’s a simply embarassing business* move given the number of countries with data protection legislation (and/or active regulators).

* or whatever motive one wishes to ascribe to the mix of for- and non-profit entities involved in muddying the waters OpenAI-style

Sam Altman does link OpenAI and WorldCoin.

As far as I understand the original source (https://www.aepd.es/prensa-y-comunicacion/notas-de-prensa/la...), Worldcoin has:

- Not provided enough information about how the data is stored/used

- Collected data from minors

- Not offered individuals to withdraw their consent

So the data protection agency of Spain is temporary halting any data processing/transfers, in order to protect people from the unlawful collection.

Is this the first time "Urgency procedure"/Article 66 (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-66-gdpr/) of the GDPR is being used in the wild?

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39617745

[dupe]

World (except Spain) coin.

...and Serbia, and...

How much traction does this creepy project have?

Any traction is too much.

A lot. There were serious queues here in Spain, especially in the beginning.

4 million people I think. More than zero, a lot less than the world population. Also so far most users are there for the free money, not for using it for ID or a payment system, myself included mostly. Actually I also signed up to a large extent out or curiosity. I know HN hates it but it actually seems quite an interesting experiment.

This is interesting to me.

On the one hand "Proof of humanity" is an important problem and is surely only going to get more important as time passes. Bots are already better than humans at solving captchas.[1]

On the other hand I cannot conceive of giving someone my biometric data so they can mint some blockchain thing from it, and although I admit I wasn't interested enough to look into it beyond reading a couple of articles, I really don't see how this specific solution makes the situation better. Eg how do they know someone hasn't pwned me and then hijacked my special proof of humanity token to using it for their bots to "prove humanity"?

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12108

> On the one hand "Proof of humanity" is an important problem and is surely only going to get more important as time passes

Governments have been doing this for centuries (see passports, identity documents, birth and death certificates). Witnessing attempts by private entities repeated attempts to "solve" this problem and make a profit has shown me the limitations of free markets. Despite the complexity and sophistication of the implementation, it boils down to a record that's looked up by a trusted entity who attests the validity of the subjects identity, or not.

I don't like WorldCoin, but I don't like sending internet services my passport and birth certificate to prove to them that I am human either.

The actual problem - which is waiting for a solution - is undeniable. (This isn't often the case with cryptocurrency projects.)

> I don't like WorldCoin, but I don't like sending internet services my passport and birth certificate to prove to them

That's about the least-private implementation one could think of; I wouldn't want to send scans of my iris to random Internet services either! This would be the equivalent raw-data implementation for Worldcoin.

> The actual problem - which is waiting for a solution - is undeniable

The solution is the government providing an oauth-like service. Internet services would only get a token and only a limited set of PII you were shown and agreed to while authenticating (e.g. your name, email address, and/or whether you're a minor/adult).

No one can attest your identity without keeping a record of it - public service or not. IMO, having private enterprise do this merely increases the attack surface.

> The solution is the government providing an oauth-like service.

This sounds great as long as you live in a strong democracy with trustworthy institutions. A lot of people don't.

Do those people not have physical identity documents issued by their non-democratic governments? What is particularly dangerous about having the same governments handle online identity for situations of thr citizens choosing? It would obviously be inadvisable to use government auth when logging into protest-against-repression.com

> I wouldn't want to send scans of my iris to random Internet services either!

You don’t. You generate some secure keys using iris data. You send the internet service a copy of your public key. They can use that to verify that you are human, but not who you are.

But a keypair is just a pair of numbers that satisfy some one-way function. If there's a way to generate the keypair from iris data from a human, then surely there's a way to generate an indistinguishable keypair using some fake data that plausibly could have come from an iris (ie it shares some of the same number theoretic and distribution properties) but did not. If that's the case, then the only part of the "proof of humanity" left to attack is to spoof the hardware so things think they are calling the iris scanner and getting a real key from a real human and instead they are calling the mock iris scanner and getting a plausible but not real key from a non-human. If the solution is something along the lines of "well we thought of that so a genuine worldcoin iris scanner has to sign the data to prove that it came from a worldcoin device" then I would bet you can get hold of a signing key using social engineering. If this thing was to take off it could be valuable to do so and many of the people operating the devices would be in countries with very low GDP per capita so it could well be in the realm of possibility to bribe your way to getting it.

I'm sure they must have thought about this but I don't understand the solution.

Each Orb has a private signing key that's generated + stored inside a secure element. For more info, search for "secure element" in the following sections of the whitepaper:

https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/technical-implementation

https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/advancing-decentralization#...

I have never been asked anything like that, except when it was for legal compliance (such as opening a bank account).

The only exception being meta a decade ago, to which I obviously answered by deleting anything meta related bar Whatsapp.

I bet you have filled out a captcha or two.

It's obvious that captchas will need to be replaced by something else, no?

Captchas are there to defeat spam. You don't need to identify someone as human for that; you just need to make it expensive to post, e.g. through proof-of-work.

With how AI is going, attestation will become necessary for many social interactions we take for granted today by assuming there is a well-intended human in the other end.

If you're hiring, or looking for a new job, the odds of you being tricked/phished are getting worse by the day. I've read stories of employees get interviewed for fake jobs as a long-con to get banking details, and employers interviewing a persona that's fronting an offshore dev team, or people who don't have work skills and aim to pick up paychecks until their dismissal is processed.

This isn't about proving that you are human, it is about being able to map your iris to the identity on government-issued documents.

In essence: good luck trying to exit/enter a country/location with access to the iris database that already mapped your identity after KYC for your bank account.

You are now living inside "Minority Report": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPDYh9EpbmA

That's not at all how WorldCoin works. And I don't want to be a WorldCoin defender here, I don't support it.

I wonder if an eyeball scan is really proof of humanity.

This may be a dumb question, buy why could someone not simply create an AI-generated iris image and fool the orb into thinking that is a unique human?

First of all, it's very hard to make a printout that looks like the real thing to a camera. Images stored on a computer capture a lossy representation of what the camera actually "saw".

Secondly, I believe that the protocol is based around the idea that the operator is trusted, i.e., they won't allow such uses of the orb. If an operator isn't trustworthy, I guess there needs to be a way to revoke the validity of all their scans.

What if you print it to a custom contact lens similar to those cosplay lenses? The operator wouldn't even notice

They have human operators too to help you stop using AI-generated photos, or your pet cat, or your kids - there's an age limit.

The main purpose of the scan it to check for uniqueness so you can't keep going up and get 50 accounts.

Preventing such attacks is one of the main reasons why custom hardware is required. For more info, search for "spoof" in this section of the whitepaper:

https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/technical-implementation#wh...

In fact, this is commonly done. There's an entire trade around having people scan their iris and you (the buyer of their biometric) keep the resultant token. I think what I read was around the more rural areas in Africa. I'm not referring to the "official" practice by World Coin themselves where people are recruited to scan (in Africa metro areas) and the participant actually get the tokens. There's also this underground trade in iris scans.

They don't, but it's harder to kidnap someone and use their eye, as opposed to steal some other piece of identification. If you would turn it around and imagine a world without paper passports and government issued id's - what would you use as unique identifier for a person?

> it's harder to kidnap someone and use their eye, as opposed to steal some other piece of identification

Is it? I use my eyes a helluva lot more than I use my government issued SSN. In fact, I've only taken my physical SSN card out of storage once, but I stare at random (potentially camera equipped) stuff all day. Of course you can still steal it from me by pretending to ask for ID, but that's true of my eye-print as well.

> If you would turn it around and imagine a world without paper passports and government issued id's - what would you use as unique identifier for a person?

I'm not sure... but I'm also convinced that 'private corporation issued id' isn't fundamentally superior to 'government issued id' and has some challenges in terms of accountability.

Being pwned does not solely mean having access to your eye in this case, also why should I trust a corporation more than a government?

Pubic key of their choosing.

This is the original announcement by the AEPD, the Spanish Data Protection Authority.

https://www.aepd.es/en/press-and-communication/press-release...

I wonder why the ban hasn't become EU-wide right afterwards.

That's a good question. I've waited a few days to reply to you, hoping that the EU would make a move.

The only news afaik is that Worldcoin failed to get injunction against Spain’s privacy suspension https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/11/worldcoin-fails-to-get-inj...

Hah so at least Worldcoin no longer has to explain why nobody in Spain uses their product.

I am afraid that they may not have an equally compelling explanation for the same problem in the rest of the world.

It wasn't nobody. People were lining up all the way outside of the mall. It's scary what people do for the price of a pair of cheap jeans.

If you had asked me how much money you'd have to pay someone for them to let you scan their eyeball, I have to say I would've said way more than €35 fake euros stuck in an app. If anything it's eye opening (eh) how little understanding there is of the personal risk people are taking on.

> If you had asked me how much money you'd have to pay someone for them to let you scan their eyeball

People paid companies like 23andMe actual money for the privilege of mailing their DNA. Getting paid to let a company your eyeball sounds like an improvement.

I think people pay these companies for providing them with information about their DNA, which is quite different.

Especially given that you can download your genetic data from 23andme. I am not sure if Worldcoin allows you download a copy of your iris data... no mention in their FAQ, at least.

But they provide so little information compared to the DNA you provide. You get stuff like "ancestry" signals which americans love in their quest for racial validation, but they get to connect humans to a point they can find the family of an unknown murderer whose DNA was found on a crime scene.

Which information is more precious overall, which is a call to action rather than a simple joke between friends "oh im 3% Banana".

> "There's a sucker born every minute" is a phrase closely associated with P. T. Barnum, an American showman of the mid-19th century, although there is no evidence that he actually said it. Early examples of its use are found among gamblers and confidence tricksters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...

I've done the scan. What personal risk do I have?

The money isn't stuck in the app by the way. I've taken out and changed to US$ about $100 and currently have $164 worth in the app and about $10 a week of coins coming in. Which is nice of them. Worldcoin is just another crypto coin like dogecoin or whatever.

Identity theft would be the first thing on most people's minds, particularly if iris scanning ever becomes more prevalent in the future and they get hacked or unintentionally leak your data, or impersonate you themselves.

Fair enough with identity theft but I think that applies to any company you have an identiy with - facebook, booking.com, banks etc. They could claim to be you in theory.

Also my id, I think, is just an optimism crypto address 0x93bf030f706e81197856e76c8a3b326640... with no name attached. You'll have a job stealing my identity with that, any more than it's easy to steal Satoshi's because you know his public bitcoin addresses.

I mean if you go to a credit card company and say I'd like to get a card in the name of some guy I don't know the name and address of but here's one of his public keys, I don't think you'll get far. Certainly not compared to getting my real name and address which is fairly exposed on the internet via phone directories and the like.

I don't think if say the photo of my iris's leaked online it would be much of a problem in the same way that the rest of my face is online and it's not much of a problem because no one accepts some photo off the web as proof of id.

One thing I think may be flawed is if I say hi I'm Tim, send me some money to the above address, then you can see all my other transactions to that address on the blockchain which breaks anonymity/privacy a bit. I'm not sure if they are going to fix that by say issuing disposable addresses but I haven't seen that so far.

What if iris scanning becomes the new "log in with your device", and what if the way worldcoin stores your iris scan is actually not encrypted?

I don't know why you're comparing a high definition full iris scan to random photo of you, they aren't the same things. The point is security is made of things you know and things you have, and eyes are hard to pass around, so someone being able to "have" your eyes to fool a scanner is useful for many classes of attacks, we don't need to know the full attack chains yet to know it's inherently a risk because it turns a thing you have into a thing you and Worldcoin and whoever worldcoin sells or gets hacked by - all have.

> ... what if the way worldcoin stores your iris scan is actually not encrypted?

Even if it's encrypted, if worldcoin gets breached in a particularly bad way (say root to their production servers) then the unencryption mechanism and keys could be leaked along with the encrypted data.

The point being that just because something is encrypted doesn't make it foolproof against everything.

People pay to get detailed photographs of their irises as "artwork", even in relatively privacy-conscious Germany.

Privacy aside, there's no way this can be done securely.

According to https://worldcoin.org/be-a-worldcoin-operator they'll gladly ship the iris scanning unit to untrusted 3rd party operators, in a similar vein to a bank shipping out PoS card terminals.

I'd love to have a play with one, it wouldn't surprise me if you could get it to mint fresh accounts out of thin air (e.g. by mitming the bus between the iris scanner and the rest of the unit, and making it report fresh unique scans)

> by mitming the bus between the iris scanner and the rest of the unit, and making it report fresh unique scans

Hmm, I wonder if the worldcoin team also thought of that possibility?

(Yes, they did, the iris processing is done inside a hardware enclave so that the obvious attack is not possible)

https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/technical-implementation

I am broadly anti-Worldcoin but it is reasonably competently executed at a technical level. It would be good to understand what they actually did before declaring it to be impossible.

Hardware enclaves are never 100% impenetrable, it comes down to making the cost of attack greater than what an attacker expects to gain. Traditional card payment terminals use nominally secure hardware and yet struggle with that tradeoff to this day, and I'm not convinced WorldCoin will do any better.

The SoC they're using, the Jetson Xavier NX, is a cousin of the very thoroughly pwned (secure enclaves and all) TX1.

Further, they don't describe how the busses connecting the sensors to the SoC are encrypted and/or authenticated, which leads me to believe that they are not.

Intel gave up on shipping SGX in consumer devices because (imho) shipping secure enclaves directly to "adversaries" (the consumer being an adversary under the SGX threat model) proved too difficult to maintain.

> (the consumer being an adversary under the SGX threat model) proved too difficult to maintain.

This is what's wrong with so much of this "security" tech. It's not for our security but for that of the businesses and their business models behind it.

They talk about a future bug bounty program - I'm certainly intrigued, and if the up-front hardware costs aren't too high I might give it a go.

Can't I just bypass it with some contact lenses that distort the scan and make it unique?

> I am broadly anti-Worldcoin but it is reasonably competently executed at a technical level. It would be good to understand what they actually did before declaring it to be impossible.

+1 to this. I'm very skeptical of the project (even though I know some of the people working on it), but the problem space is extremely hard and they're giving it an actual shot. If you can think of a potential problem in 5 minutes, I guarantee you that they've thought of it too.

I'm sure they are. But I'm not worried about them failing. I'm worried about them succeeding.

I think they have to trust the orb operators a little bit.

How easy is it to trick this iris scanner with a fake eye?

Hard. They have people looking at what you are up to and there is gadetry similar to the iphone face scanner that can tell a face from say a photo of a face.

There’s so many issues with biometrics:

- You can’t change them if they’re compromised

- They’re unreliable, they can change with age, depends on the environment that they’re measured in

- It’s not really “proof of humanity” just “proof of biology”

Worldcoin is an interesting attempt though

Oh cool!

There was a whole load of these zombies lining up here in the local shopping centre to give Altman their irises.

They're free to do so of course but they're lowering the barrier for privacy significantly by presenting the world with the reality of a significant proportion of the population with their irises scanned. Thus it will be harder for us to keep our privacy just like privacy on internet is gone as a fait accompli. People are already using this as a debate argument against privacy: "Your privacy is already gone anyway so why do you care about this new issue?". That's how bad things have become.

The same way as that, having a significant portion of society do this, will mean I'll be unable to prove I'm not a bot without getting my own eyes scanned in the future.

I've done the zombie thing and it's less of a privacy issue than you might think. They don't need your name or contact details, though you can optionally give some.

Your name is most likely a lot less unique than your iris is. They don't need it. Once more services start using iris scanning it can all be correlated. The issue is not now but for the future.

Do we really need to scan irises in order to do this? What we need is centralized media. If I want to post an image from CNN, I should be able to just to repost whatever CNN has already posted. That way we can retain CNNs digital signature on the post and my audience can check the signature and know it’s real.

We don’t need the irises. We just need brand loyalty.

The problem with big brained plays such as Altman's OpenAI and WC double bet is that they're plays created by people with such an ego and lack of compassion that they forget that ... humans will still be humans.

When all is said and done, none of this changes that. Humans will push back against non-human things ... with regulations and eventually violence.

This is why nations spend so much time hiding the non-human factors acting against them.

Will AI prevent me from feeling human feelings? No. To Altman and many others this seems like world changing stuff, but is it?

Worldcoin's postion is

>“Our efforts to engage with the AEPD and provide them with an accurate view of Worldcoin and World ID have gone unanswered for months,” he added. (FT article)

Personally I go with the free market idea that if a company wants to provide a service and users want to take advantage of it, 4 million+ so far including myself, then governments provide limited value by blocking that unless they can show it's actually harming people.

What service exactly is WorldCoin providing to the "users" here?

There are three main things. An anonymous ID as proof of being a unique human, a payments system where you can send coins to other accounts, and free coins.