Beginning early July, mirrored spheres began popping up in cities across the world. It is not public art but a 6.2 pound biometric imaging device designed to scan your eyeballs and capture your irises.

No, it’s not a joke. The company doing this is Worldcoin. Worldcoin was founded three years ago by Alex Blania and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. Their intent is to create “a new identity and financial network connecting billions of people in the age of A.I.” via a privacy-ensuring digital identity it calls World ID and a digital currency, WLD. World ID is supposed to be a ‘perfectly safe’ global identity protocol to enable individuals to prove their personhood online in an era of rampant A.I. deepfakes. WLD is a tool to build an “A.I.-funded UBI [universal basic income]”

This should all sound familiar because they’re the same arguments being made for digital currencies like Bitcoin. The company stresses they have security all along the trust chain, but it reads more like a dystopian nightmare in which everyone has been cataloged and identified by an unknown party with unknown motives. This is a company that could be working for anyone. A 3rd party agent that has unknown motives, unknown technical expertise, and unknown longevity to keep your biometric data safe. You do not really know which government, people, nor company is really behind it all nor what their values nor legal protections you would have. It’s a terrify black box of giving up your biometric data to an almost completely unknown entity. I vote a hard no.

In my opinion, this is a violation of privacy and an extremely bad idea. Even if they are secure today – are they really ready to protect your biometric data, collected surreptitiously, without consent, for all time, and never to sell it? It seems pretty unlikely as every country and every company who has promised this before hasn’t lasted 10 years before being hacked, leaking, being forced to turn over that data, or just flat selling you and your data to the highest bidder when they’re bought out or go bankrupt. Ready for North Korea, China, or Putin to have access to your World ID and any money you put in WLD?

So, maybe be sure to wear some good sunglasses when you find a shiny orb laying on the street.

At least some folks are starting to do an investigation – one I suspect will end badly for Worldcoin considering the EU’s less than open stance on collection/storage of biometric data collection and privacy.

Article here.