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AlphaWeaver

Will the Kenyan government now have access to the biometric data collected by Worldcoin?

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Just how bad this is would depend on how they stored the data, I guess.

Why does it feel like they probably keep WAY more data than they need instead of just the hash?

Glad they’ve been shut down at least.

I bet there's a really well understood data store that contains minimal data and meets various anonymity proofs.

And then a tag-manager implementation with MixPanel, Intercom, Amplitude, Heap, FullStory, and Segment, all receiving every interaction with a full JSON object describing the current state of the application and user.

Ugh. This is probably the true nature of the thing, it's shocking how this happens at nearly every company I've been at. Eng is super concerned with privacy and security, and then as soon as Marketing gets a hold of it, it's all coated in 6 layers of analytics for funnel tracking leads.

I need to write a blog post about the time an ad network told me that their required integration was to integrate their JS bundle that would send all text input to their servers.

When I told them No Fucking Way (in not that many more words), they said they would need to get executive sign-off on a "custom" integration. The "custom" bit being us doing everything ourselves server-side and sending them a single opaque identifier for conversions.

They "securely" store the iris codes so that their machines can check for duplicates. They have the database even if the crypto crashes.

Molly White points out [0] that they seem to have gotten awfully vague about what they store, emphasizing in some contexts that the hashes on the chain are all that technically HAVE to be retained (and encouraging the assumption that those themselves are rigorously impossible to extrapolate personal information from)— but also insinuating to people at en-Orb-ment that they need to opt in to letting the company store full imagery of their iris scans in case the company decides to change the hash algorithm someday.

[0] https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/worldcoin-a-solution-in-...

Full iris images is exactly what I expect/am afraid of.

I think that hashes of the full iris images aren't much better.

It’s a little better. To be useful someone else has to use the same hashing algorithm. Assuming the hash isn’t usefully reversible.

A picture could work with any algorithm.

They’re both bad though.

> emphasizing in some contexts that the hashes on the chain are all that technically HAVE to be retained

Even the context of the primary reason they cite for collecting retinal data (to prevent the same person from getting $50 multiple times) requires they keep this data for at least as long as they're paying people to scan their eyeballs.

Why do they need the original to prevent people to get paid multiple times? What good is the hash they're storing if the same person's retinas don't reliably produce the same hash?

I'm talking about retaining the hash, not the original eyeball data. Retaining the hash is nearly as bad as retaining the original data, so I consider them both to be roughly equivalent for this use case.

Well, Worldcoin claims the data captured by the orb (face & iris scan) is deleted after the corresponding ID is generated from it.

https://worldcoin.org/blog/worldcoin/orb-faqs

i assumed that was the point

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