An appealing orb from the Worldcoin startup is making waves in the crypto and identity spaces, promising a novel way to verify your humanity and uniqueness. As I am sure many can relate, being greeted by a futuristic metallic orb ready to scan your iris isn’t your standard brunch experience — this is what awaits those who visit central Paris at a gathering assembled by Worldcoin and Global Coin Research.
Worldcoin, co-founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI, is shooting for the stars: a new mechanism to verify identity, a potential bedrock for a future digital economy, and even mooting universal basic income as an application of the technology. But, as is always the case with ambitious initiatives, privacy concerns loom large.
We already discern arguments on both sides of the biometric data collection spectrum; this kind of deeply personal information can support high-security applications, but at the cost of potentially exposing your identity in unauthorized or unexpected ways. Worldcoin assures users that all scans are used solely to create individual digital identifiers and are never stored.
Nevertheless, initial concerns are difficult to shake, even though the company aims to mitigate these sentiments by their transparency, open-sourcing most of their hardware and software, including the protocol.
During the process in Paris, the scanner presented a few technical problems, requiring multiple attempts to connect the Worldcoin Orb and the administrator to the WiFi. Despite these minor hiccups, the actual scanning was straightforward. After the application verified presence of the orb, a QR code from my World App had to be scanned by the orb’s `two eyes` before scanning my iris.
Considering the potential shaky ground upon which my iris data sat, my discomfort with the prospect of private details being used in unwarranted ways dissipated once the scan was over. The system designers and our braches into an avant-garde technodream may have mollified any unease.
Interestingly, despite the minor glitches, the experience was smoother than anticipated. The user-friendly design instilled some form of calm, a reflection of our readiness to embrace the edge of technological advances.
And so, having wrestled with the pros and cons of an iris-scanning identity-verification orb, I awoke one morning to learn that the Worldcoin network was live, I held the key to 25WLD now available to claim, and our digital future was only just beginning.
Source: Coindesk
