Thousands of Kenyans flocked the Kenyatta International Convention Centre and shopping malls in Nairobi last week to scan their eyeballs in exchange for Worldcoin cryptocurrency tokens worth Sh7,700.
The emergence of the global digital currency 'World Coin' by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has drawn attention worldwide because of its potential to impact the financial industry and unleash a wave of digital identification innovations on a global scale.
As digital technologies continue to offer enormous socioeconomic opportunities to nations and citizens, we are faced with a difficult challenge to ensure secure, efficient, and non-invasive verification of individual identities across digital spaces.
The Worldcoin Eye Scan technology will capture the irises of each person as an identity instrument and further process the biometric data in a device named the Orb, then securely encrypting and saving it across dispersed networks.
Many nations globally utilise biometric verifications for voting, transactions and agreements. Worldcoin aims to hit the 1 billion users milestone by the end of 2023. Its website says it has already signed up 2.6 million people. The possibility that billions of people will sign up and that their data might end up in the hands of unauthorised actors on the dark web is a serious threat.
While Worldcoin Eye Scan and World Coin Orb claim to retain anonymity and privacy, their components are based on blockchain technology, which is vulnerable to 51 per cent attacks, therefore any data breaches might have ravaging consequences.
Instances of data breaches with Orb operators' systems being hacked exist in the public domain. These further create doubts, you might end up becoming a victim of increasingly expensive ransomware hackers and data breaches. Government officials signing for Worldcoin will be highly susceptible to fraud, cryptonic scams and massive data hacks of sensitive information.
The blockchain ecosystem is sceptical of its principles and values. A Minderoo Centre for technology and democracy report indicates a lack of evidence for adequate safeguards against cryptocurrency fraud and scams in unregulated digital environments.
The ethical and practical implications of collecting and storing such sensitive data in exchange for money have left many disturbed and the project going under careful scrutiny as the world charts into unknown paths with a global digital currency.
Cryptography and privacy experts have raised critical concerns and questions about data privacy, valuation and potential exploitation; sparking off a new debate on the future of decentralised identity, artificial intelligence and whether iris-scanning technology is the only way to explore the future of digital identity.
Kenya’s data protection agency, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner issued an advisory, warning Kenyans about scanning their irises in exchange for crypto tokens. Worldwide, the United Kingdom's data regulatory body is actively investigating Worldcoin, while the French’s Data Privacy Agency has raised the alarm on the legality of the data collection methods used by the project.
Developing nations like Kenya, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh are already struggling to cope with the stagnation in their economies and are at high risk of bearing the negative consequences of Worldcoin's price fluctuations. This price change unpredictably renders Worldcoin less suitable as a reliable store of value. So, its widespread adoption as a mainstream currency will encounter critical challenges.
Worldcoin is forcing nations to cooperate, collaborate and associate with the initiative, raising an alarm about what will be the repercussions on those who don’t. Will the impact of exclusion be extreme?
Whether Worldcoin will be a groundbreaking innovation or a dystopian data trap will depend on how the project moves forward and if it can prove its commitment to the responsible, compliant and ethical use of data. To unlock the benefits of this ambitious financial innovation, a balanced strategy, together with strong security measures and ethical concerns, will be pivotal.
Data scientist at Unep
