Worldcoin, founded by US tech entrepreneur Sam Altman, offers free crypto tokens to people who agree to have their eyeballs scanned.
It claims to be creating a new global “identity and financial network”.
Altman, who founded Open AI, which built chat bot ChatGPT, says he hopes the initiative will help confirm if someone is a human or a robot. He also says this could lead to everyone being paid a universal basic income but it is not clear how.
Sure, bud, hand over our biometrics for your private fiat money, for the promise of unclear-how basic income, meanwhile with your exploiting the poors and manipulating the laws to favor yourself.
This sounds like the techbro response to climate change: it will fix itself because reasons and muh tech.
InNoVaTiOn!!
Yeah, fuck them.
Why? I mean it still seems sketchy, but so what if people want to trade their personal data for currency?
They’re targeting low income locations to data mine on people. It’s shady asf and they’re barely even paying them. Meanwhile the people running it are obscenely wealthy and get 20% of all worldcoin…
People don’t want to sell their personal data for currency.
People need currency. There is only a finite amount of currency in the world. Power structures are formed because some people have currency and other people need currency.
People are forced to do things like sell their bodies, sell their organs, and - yes - sell their biometric data. Because they need currency to survive. You don’t see billionaires lining up for this.
It’s exploitation of those who are most desperate. You can argue that there’s the systemic problem - that there shouldn’t be billionaires alongside people who are starving and need to sell their bodies - but that isn’t being solved anytime soon.
But exploiting this systemic problem, using it as leverage to convince millions of poor folks to sell their biometric data… that’s immoral. It’s immoral to take advantage of desperation just to line your own pockets.
Why do you think you’re hearing about this from some of the poorest countries in the world?
They don’t even pay you each time they use your data. It’s a one time payment and that doesn’t work in this service economy. Even if you don’t care about privacy the deal is bad.
Same reason why selling your own organs is mostly forbidden; when there is such disparity between access to resources, we can only assume the system, and the poorest people in it, will be abused.
This whole WorldCoin thing sounds incredibly dystopian.
is incredibly dystopian *
Did they find the treasure trove of coins?
Also, fuck that company
Will wearing polarized sunglasses thwart the eye scanning? This world timeline is starting to freak me out.
Hell, in 2019 conspiracy theorists We’re advocating to wear a mask to thwart facial recognition software. Now wearing a mask is being part of the world elite!
