Worldcoin Orb Software Goes Open-Source — What Does it Mean for User Data Privacy?

cryptonews.com:

The Worldcoin Orb has open-sourced some of its eyeball-scanning machinery in a bid by founders to verify its claims to data privacy, according to a Friday blog post.

Developers can now review the software components of the Worldcoin Orb on Github, where it has been made publicly available under a MIT/Apache 2.0 dual license.

The reveal adds to the organization’s pre-existing hardware and iris recognition repositories made available in January 2023 and December 2023 respectively.

“Their public availability marks significant progress in making the Orb’s image processing transparent and its privacy claims verifiable,” the Worldcoin Foundation wrote.

Worldcoin (WLD) is a crypto project designed to distribute digital tokens to every human being on the planet, creating the foundation for a universal basic income scheme.

Doing so requires verifying “humanness” – that each user of the network is actually a one-of-a-kind person, and not artificial intelligence (AI) or a duplicate.

Hence, the foundation is spreading a vast network of Worldcoin Orbs throughout the globe, where wanting network participants can peer into the orb, have their iris scanned, verify their identity, and receive tokens.

However, given the ominous nature of “orbs” and “eyeball scanning,” its founders – including Sam Altman – received massive criticism from the crypto community for what seemed like a massive privacy invasion/surveillance tool.

This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people's iris scans (for "fairness"), and waves away the implications by saying "we deleted the scans!"

Yeah, but you save the *hashes* produced by the scans. Hashes that match *future* scans.

Don't catalogue eyeballs. https://t.co/uAk0NYGeZu

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden)