An independent Trail of Bits audit found no path to extract personally-identifiable data from production Orbs

Opposing arguments

The Bavarian data-protection authority (BayLDA) ordered Worldcoin to delete millions of stored iris hashes for violating the EU’s GDPR, proving that the hashes remain personally identifiable data under European law despite World’s “anonymisation” claims

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

South Korea’s Personal‑Information Protection Commission fined Worldcoin ₩1.1 billion (≈ US$0.8 m) for illegally collecting 30 000 irises and transferring the data overseas without consent.

Quotes that support claims

The auditors attempted to validate claims related to how the “iris code” is handled and communicated to the backend. They report that “we believe the iris code is not written to persistent storage on the Orb and that it is included only in a single request to the Orb’s back end,” and that “[w]hile this configuration can be improved to make it more secure (TOB-ORB-10), it should not be possible for typical attackers to extract the iris code from the Orb’s network traffic; the attacker would have to be in control of one of the trusted certificates.”

Related projects

Related topics

Sources

Worldcoin orb privacy and security audit report

Supporting arguments

World ID relies on zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) that mathematically prevent anyone from linking a person’s World ID across apps.

Core Orb firmware and biometric pipeline are open-source, allowing anyone to audit that no personal data is retained

AMPC’s MPC pipeline retains raw iris codes on-device, ensuring that biometric images never leave the Orb

Tags

Orbs adequately protect user privacy