• simple
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    11 months ago

    Sounds bizarre. Is this just a crypto wallet? What is “World ID” used for? This sounds like a scam to gather everyone’s biometric data.

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      This seems like what would happen if the Theranos lady and FTX guy had a love child and it started a company.

      They believe they have a personal scanner that can turn biometric data into a unique hash and use that as a basis for an identity service and crypto wallet. They say that you never have to worry about losing your wallet credentials, because if you do, they just scan you again. The scan is guaranteed to resolve to the same hash, which no one else in the world has. Simple, right?

      That second part might actually be possible. There are 8 billion humans on earth, which is a lot, but only 2^33 or so. They probably use 256 or 512 bit hashes, which makes the chance of two people’s hashes colliding so small that it is likely to never happen.

      But do you trust the orb to arrive at the same hash every time, regardless of aging or other bodily changes? Every device fails now and then, and when it’s a device that is tied to a digital identity (and crypto wallet) that failure needs to be accounted for.

      We have no transparency from them, they keep saying they will make stuff public but it hasn’t happened yet. All their workers are contractors who get paid in Tether, which has its own sketchiness to it. And I haven’t even gotten into the privacy implications of a private company with biometric info on every human on earth. There are so many alarm bells that there’s no way this doesn’t end poorly.

      • magic_lobster_party@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        That’s just stupid. You should never ever be able to “regenerate” keys to a wallet. It’s supposed to be completely random. Once you have created your keys, there should be no way to do it again.

        Now you just have to trust that the scanner doesn’t save the data, because if they do, they also got your keys (and complete access to your wallet).

  • Raisin8659@monyet.cc
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    11 months ago

    Does sound suspicious. Who would want a non-open-sourced non-platformed identity service?

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    Already 1M+ downloads for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worldcoin

    This is not a scam, but it is a seriously scary shit. Forward march to the dystopian world.