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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I'm not ok with scamming people in 3rd world countries.

I was appalled to see that most of the orb locations were NOT in western nations. This is an obvious attempt to collect biometric/human data for training purposes, by taking advantage of populations of developing nations, by giving them fake money.

Exactly, you have to be a certain level of cynical to be able to even suggest such a thing. It's a new form of colonial abuse, not unlike the way low value goods were exchanged with native peoples the world over in return for very high value goods or even their lives.

You can even take it a step further because you can sign up to be a "Worldcoin Orb Operator" and help facilitate the entire process against your fellow countrymen.

Honestly I was impressed with how brazen this entire thing is - they might have well just paid for eyeball scans and cut the crypto crap.

What is exactly bad here? The eyeballs photos are not stored unless you agree with it. It’s just hashed and stored in the system. It’s just a hash of eyeballs to allow checking who is human and who is not. It doesn’t store any personal data.

Did you read the whitepaper?

Scans of eyeballs were stored for training / algorithm improvement purposes during the beta phase rollout.

> This is an obvious attempt to collect biometric/human data for training purposes

Dream bigger! This biometric information is valuable, it can be sold or licensed to (current or future) identity companies, or included as part of a Palantir/Anduril/$Tolkien_Noun border security or intelligence services sold to governments all over the world. I'm sure the CIA & secret-police-types would love getting access to this data once they have a larger dataset (6 to 7 digits)

To me, SSN is enough to personally identify. Additional information would be redundant for that purpose. Of course, if any information is misused, that’s illegal. And it’s not a lot of money for them to steal back, unless it’s about labor control. But again, that’s illegal.

In the US, what incorporates the existence of federal government power is that there is somebody to mandate it, and this is represented by capital/property/enforcement/vote. Those that are enfranchised with property (like money) are legally recognized as invested in upholding the agreement of union: then the law, and hence their stake, survives. You’re trusted to do business, run for office, make new laws, etc. You can make systems that persist or harden the fairness of a law.

By enfranchising people worldwide, you’re giving them a stake. Enforcement, however, is the hard part. Is this coin rigorous enough? Is it stable? What’s the jurisdiction?

OneCoin was also targeting people in 3rd world countries to a large extent.

The people with the lowest morals always seem to target the weakest, targeting older people is another common target for these scammers.

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