Happy Nice Mall

Finally, as we passed during our interview at the beginning of March, it was something Blania said that helped us begin to understand Worldcoin.

“We’re going to let privacy experts repeatedly decouple our systems before we deploy them on a large scale,” he said, answering a question about the privacy backlash last fall.

Blania has just shared how her company has recruited 450,000 people into Worldcoin – which she said that her spheres scanned for 450,000 eye, face and body groups and stored all that data to train her neural network. The company realized that this data collection was problematic and aimed to stop doing so. Still, this didn’t provide the same privacy protections to early users. This seeming contradiction surprised us: those who lack vision and the ability to see the big picture? After all, compared to the company’s stated goal of registering a billion users, maybe 450,000, is is small.

But each of these 450,000 people is someone with their own hopes, lives, and rights, and has nothing to do with the ambitions of a Silicon Valley startup.

Talking to Blania clarified something we struggled to make sense of: How could a company talk so passionately about its privacy-protecting protocols while openly violating the privacy of so many. Our interview helped us see that for Worldcoin: these legions of testers were mostly not intended end users. On the contrary, their eyes, bodies, and life patterns were just crude for Worldcoin’s neural networks. Meanwhile, lower-level orb operators were paid to feed the algorithm and often privately grappled with their own moral concerns. The massive effort to teach Worldcoin’s AI to recognize who or what is human was ironically dehumanizing for those involved.

When we put seven pages of report findings and questions on Worldcoin, the company’s response What we uncovered was that almost everything negative was simply an “isolated event”.[s]” won’t matter in the end because the next (public) iteration would be better. “We believe privacy and anonymity rights are fundamental, so anyone who signs up for Worldcoin in the next few weeks will be able to do so without sharing. any The company wrote that its biometric data is about us. The fact that nearly half a million people had already been put to the tests seemed to matter little.

Rather, it is the results that really matter: Worldcoin will have an attractive user number to support the sales pitch as Web3’s preferred identity solution. And when real, redeemable items—whether globes, Web3 passports, the currency itself, or all of the above—are released to their intended users, everything will be ready with no messy signs of craftsmanship or human body parts. behind.