Worldcoin Wins Two Million Sign-Ups But Can They be Trusted?

Worldcoin has confirmed it has onboarded two million people onto its World ID platform, but its codebase mostly remains a black box.

The new sign-ups come from Seoul, New York, Japan, Buenos Aires, Berlin, and Barcelona.

One Identity is the Goal, CEO Says

According to a press release, the company is onboarding 40,000 new people daily. The company takes photographs of a person’s eye using its Orb technology.

Billed as the way to verify a genuine eye versus a photograph, the Orb is central to Worldcoin’s plan to identify real people amid a rise in artificial intelligence.

Tools for Humanity (TFH), the company behind the World ID protocol, says the Orb does not store personal data. Rather, it stores the image as an iris code and destroys the original file.

Speaking on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast recently, TFH CEO Alex Bania said the Worldcoin project was trying to give each person in the world a unique digital identity. Its World ID would help governments deal with the issue of someone holding two passports and would digitize archaic government databases.

The project recently raised $115 million in a funding round to hire new staff to expand operations. Worldcoin recently integrated its World ID protocol into Auth0, a global authentication platform. Web3 organization Talent Protocol also integrated World ID.

Worldcoin Codebase is Still Closed, Despite Promises

Privacy advocates initially billed the Orb as invasive when it used photographs to train its artificial intelligence to separate real from fake. Several entities, including whistleblower Edward Snowden, saw the project in its early stages as the first steps toward a surveillance state.

Worldcoin co-founder Sam Altman said privacy concerns would diminish once Worldcoin open-sources its code.

However, at press time, the project’s GitHub reveals scant information about the project’s inner workings. Mostly-closed codebase repositories contain front-end application programming interfaces for developers to integrate World ID.

Additionally, it cannot provide a drawing of a circuit board bridging the main board with the front unit.

A report published in the MIT Technology Review reported that Worldcoin contractors exploited people in poorer regions to train the Orb’s AI. In response to the accusations, Tools for Humanity said its contractors had signed agreements on their responsibilities but were solely responsible for their actions outside of that.

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