Hidden Silicon Intentions

Worldcoin, a dystopian idea reveals its true colours

Over the week I came across this piece around WorldCoin and the real run down about what the whole fiasco was about:

Neeraj K. Agrawal @NeerajKA

it seems like this fairly damning article about worldcoin that came out a couple of months ago went under the radar

technologyreview.comDeception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test usersThe startup promises a fairly-distributed, cryptocurrency-based universal basic income. So far all it’s done is build a biometric database from the bodies of the poor.

For those of you that don’t have the necessary context, Worldcoin’s idea was to create a unique user identifier that would prove someone is indeed a human cryptographically by using their eye scans and other biometric data. They raised $100m at a 3B valuation.

Oh did I mention that this was “for the community” — lol yeah right.

It’s things like this that irk me about certain classes of projects and the investors that back them. Something that is marketed to “help improve the world” but with such predatory deal terms and also dubious ethical issues associated with it.

Anyways, going to the article itself. Basically what they did was go to third world countries and then promise people effectively airdrops or the opportunity to be part of something novel and collect a huge database of eye scans. Now they promise that they “never store the data”, which could be true but also categorically false. Because the data itself doesn’t matter, the hash of it does.

For those of you that don’t know what a hashing function is, it’s basically when you take an input of text and the algorithm will always produce the same output for that particular text. If you change a letter then the output is different. However, you can’t determine the input from the output. ie ABC would become 902fbdd2b1df0c4f70b4a5d23525e932 but there’s not usually a way to know 902fbdd2b1df0c4f70b4a5d23525e932 equates to ABC unless you use trial and error.

So what Worldcoin is doing is:

• Collecting eyescans from unsuspecting 3rd world country citizens

• Promising them future money (that’s already value at a 3bn FDV)

• Creating a database of human biometric information that should be very sensitive

• Claiming that they’re helping the world — whatever that means

What’s even more crazy is that the technology itself isn’t fully reliable and can take multiple attempts to get right.

I don’t know what it is about Silicon Valley but every once in a while you get a Hidden Silicon Intentions startup that feels so wrong on the outside to people in the know how but have very powerful VC backers that will lend their credibility and build momentum for it.

Crypto started getting into this territory as well in the last bull market but luckily we have the bear market to wash away the excesses.

Anyways, that’s it for this piece. Let me know if you enjoyed this piece because there’s many more Hidden Silicon Intention examples I can think of 😛