WorldCoin is busy doing activations in front of supermarkets in Kenya unchecked.
Despite the well-stipulated Data Protection Laws in Kenya, many citizens are not aware of the dangers they are exposing themselves to.
Part of the sign up to the crypto project is the requirement for iris scanning. Iris is the colored tissue at the front of the eye that contains the pupil in the center.
Worldcoin developed a device called Orb, which scans the iris of a person to prove their uniqueness and humanness and assigns them a World ID that can be used as a global digital passport.
The crypto which was founded by OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT is accused of perpetuating the black maerket for iris data
Many government surveillance cameras exploit the use of iris data to identity and track citizens. This has ben well covered in China.
Now, fraudsters are reportedly buying detailed scans of people’s irises in order to claim coins for the still-unreleased Worldcoin project.
The Kenyan WorldCoin sales people often ambush people in malls and in front of supermarkets, they sell them the idea of crypto, with ponzi scheme catch phrases, throwing words about Bitcoin and such.
Many have signed up oblivious of what will befall them.
Edward Snowden warned.
“This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people’s iris scans (for ‘fairness’), and waves away the implications by saying ‘we deleted the scans,’” Snowden said. “Yeah, but you save the *hashes* produced by the scans. Hashes that match *future* scans. Don’t catalogue eyeballs,” Snowden added.
Hackers
According to the Kenya Financial Sector Stability Report, Kenya’s financial systems, including mobile banking lost over 444 million in the year ending June 2022.
This was a sharp rise from Sh158.4 million the previous year.
Without good data prpotetion mechanism including civic education, the trend is set to rise as more and more people are being onborded online for payments and data processing.
