Worldcoin Scanning Project: Grabbing eyeballs, literally!

The World project, brainchild of OpenAI , CEO, Sam Altman, has launched a digital scanning project across several countries including Britain, Japan and India reportedly to create a new identity and financial network. Participants are being told the new digital ID will help prove online that they are human and not a bot. Further, they will fetch 25 Worldcoin tokens as freebies.

As per media reports, the project is garnering a healthy response from curious pedestrians on the streets of Tokyo, London, and Bengaluru. In fact, a crypto conference held in Tokyo saw people waiting in long queues to have their eyeballs scanned. A co-working space in east London handed over free free t-shirts and stickers proclaiming "verified human" post the scan to several happy users. At a prominent Bengaluru mall, company representatives were seen explaining the scan process to obliging passers-by. Clearly, there is palpable excitement among the public at large, strong enough to withstand the concerns being voiced by data regulation agencies and privacy campaigners.?

• While the US privacy activist organization Electronic Privacy Information Center calls the project a potential privacy nightmare, UK privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch has warned against the risk of biometric data being hacked or compromised
• Clearly, participants find the lure of financial gains from crypto coins too overpowering to consider the risk of sharing their personal data
• Notably, most users have not read Worldcoin's privacy policy, which says that data may be passed to subcontractors and could be accessed by governments and authorities while also claiming that necessary mechanisms to mitigate the risk of unauthorised access are in place

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