Vitalik Buterin outlines ‘four major risks’ with Worldcoin following token launch

Description

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin highlighted four potential pitfalls of Worldcoin's iris-scanning identity verification solution, co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, which launched its WLD token earlier today.

Authors

James Hunt

Publish date

Jul 24, 2023 - 12:00am

Publisher

The Block

Related people

Vitalik Buterin

Related projects

World

Referenced by

Do the Orbs adequately protect user privacy, or are there risks to be aware of?

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Question

As the Worldcoin project involves iris scanning, it raises substantial privacy concerns, according to Buterin. Even though the system currently only stores hashed versions of iris scans, not the actual images, and aims to protect user identity with ZK-SNARKs and other cryptographic techniques, there is an inherent risk of identity-related information being misused or leaked, Buterin said. “At the very least, if someone else scans your iris, they can check it against the database to determine whether or not you have a World ID. Potentially, iris scans might reveal more information,” he added.

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Prominent technologists warn the Orb scheme could create a dystopian biometric registry

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