While World says its protocol is moving toward greater decentralization — highlighting open-source contributions and the governance section of its white paper — critics argues that meaningful user ownership is still lacking.“We need to build systems that allow individuals to prove their humanity without creating centralized repositories of biometric or personal data,” said El Damaty.“This means embracing zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized governance, and open standards that empower individuals, not corporations.”Related: Sam Altman’s eye-scanning crypto project World launches in USThe need for secure identity systemsThe urgency behind developing secure identity systems isn’t without merit.
He argued that both reflect a pattern of aggressive data acquisition framed as innovation, warning that such practices risk eroding privacy and normalizing surveillance under the banner of progress.“The irony here is hard to miss,” El Damaty claimed.“OpenAI built its foundation by scraping vast amounts of unconsented user data to train its models, and now Worldcoin is taking that same aggressive data acquisition approach into the realm of biometric identity.”In 2023, a class-action lawsuit filed in California accused OpenAI and Microsoft of scraping 300 billion words from the internet without consent, including personal data from millions of users, such as children.
World’s biometric model is inherently at odds with this ethos.”El Damaty argued that despite using tools like multiparty computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, World’s reliance on custom hardware — the Orb — and centralized code deployment undermines the decentralization it claims to champion.“This is by design to achieve their goals of uniquely identifying individual humans.
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Author / Journalist: Cointelegraph by Amin Haqshanas
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