"Privacy Preserving" Eye Scans to Foil AI

An attendee scans her face at a facial recognition entry gate at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 8. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News)

Did not Western news outlets and China pundits deplore the fact that Beijing planned to scan all 1.3-billion Chinese residents' faces to enable the Chinese Communist Party to keep track of all its citizens and aid in its long-range, yet short-term plans to instant identification and aid in coercion of its population? A population for which there is no privacy, where the state apparatus follows all its citizens' moves and directly influences its thinking en masse. 

 

That's China for you, administering the world largest population (recently overtaken by India) to firmly plant its metaphorical fist in everyone's face. Privacy? Freedom? Human Rights? 

An immense plan for total control, suitable for a totalitarian society that seeks to control each and every aspect of its peoples' lives. Dystopian to the extreme. And then there's a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a plan to scan the iris of everyone on Earth, not just one country's vast population. The goal ostensibly far more humane; to protect society at large from the prospect of Artificial Intelligence posing as human, and the need to secure a method in which biology can be separated from technology. 

 

Different entirely, hmmm?

"Maybe it will work out and maybe it doesn't, but trying stuff like this is how progress happens."

"I'm hopeful Worldcoin can contribute to conversations about how we share access, benefits and governance of future AI systems."

Sam Altman, founder, OpenAI 

Sam Altman's Worldcoin verifies that people are humans using eyeball-scanning orbs.

Business Insider

 

Having launched ChatGPT on the world, with computer scientists at the fore of this brave new world of communications questioning its outcome, Sam Altman launched project Worldcoin in Britain on Monday including 34 other countries, a venture whose aim is to scan billions of eyes with the use of a mounted orb the size of a football weighing six pounds to scan people's eyes for the generation of a  unique digital record.

Worldcoin names that digital record a World ID; "proof of personhood" and Altman has argued it will enable people to proffer proof online that they are human, not robots, not fraudsters. Such verification, he says is a requirement to challenge and counter the growing threat posed potentially by Artificial Intelligence, the very technology he has himself been front and centre in advancing.

GM Seoul

 

"Increasingly powerful AI models will further amplify the difficulty of distinguishing humans from bots", the company offers in its announcement of the Worldcoin U.K. launch. There is roughly 150 working orbs deployed by the company around the world, two of which are located in London, and so far the company has signed up some two million people representing a tiny fraction of the roughly eight billion total world population it has plans to cover.

Concerns around the potential risks of a startup gathering massive amounts of sensitive biometric data has privacy advocates alerted. Worldcoin insists however, that its proprietary technology is "privacy-preserving", that its orbs delete the biometric data gathered by default. Although the venture was officially launched on Monday of last week, the project has been in operation since 2019.

Initially the project focused on first sign-ups within low income countries, including Sudan and Malaysia. Some people who signed up believed the project was government operated, or had official government backing, according to an MIT Technology Review. Cryptocurrency of the same name backs up the venture. Local contractors operate the face-scanning orbs. Their reward is in cryptocurrency Worldcoin for signing up new users.

As well, people who submit to ID-checking scans will receive 24 free Worldcoin tokens also, which began trading at $1.70, leaping to a high of $3.53.

And in China...

"The public is increasingly worried about the abuse of facial recognition technology", Yang Wanming, vice president of the Supreme People’s Court, said in a news conference on Wednesday. "The calls for strengthening protection of facial information are increasing."

 

Photo: Mack DeGeurin