This iris scanning identification technology has already been banned in some European countries for privacy reasons.
ADVERTISEMENT
World, a biometric identification project co-founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI, would not comply with European data protection rules, according to a German authority, and was subject to a corrective measure.
The company, formerly known as Worldcoin, scans irises and faces and uses that data to create a means of personal identification online and prove that the user is human and not a robot.
San Francisco-based Tools for Humanity makes World’s technology – a spherical device called the “Orb” that scans the eyes – but World’s European headquarters and manufacturing plant are in the German state of Bavaria .
On Thursday, after a months-long investigation, the Bavarian Data Protection Supervisory Office (BayLDA) said that World’s identification procedure involved “a number of fundamental data protection risks for a large number of data subjects”.
The German authority rules as This technology does not comply with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and orders Word to initiate a data deletion procedure that complies with GDPR rules.
“With today’s decision, we apply European fundamental rights standards in favor of data subjects in a technologically demanding and legally very complex case”says Michael Will, president of BayLDA.
“All users who have provided “Worldcoin” with their iris data will in future have the possibility to assert their right to erasure without restriction”he adds in a press release.
The company disputes these accusations
World appealed the decision and asked regulators to clarify whether the privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) deployed by World Network meet the legal definition of anonymization in the EU.
Damien Kieran, head of privacy at Tools for Humanity, told Euronews Next that Michael Will was “stuck between a rock and a hard place”.
“Without wanting to speak for him, I think he is aware of the technical quality of our product, but that he is under a lot of pressure”says Damien Kieran. “It’s complicated to be a supervisory authority in the EU at the moment”.
He further states that anonymization and deletion of data are “essential for allowing people to identify themselves as human beings online while remaining completely private”.
“However, without a clear definition of anonymization, we may lose our most powerful tool in the fight for privacy in the AI era”he adds.
How does the technology work?
Damien Kieran also specifies that the BayLDA investigation focused on the time during which World collected iris codes and stored them in a database.
“We don’t do that anymore.”he tells Euronews Next.
Damien Kieran explain that World no longer has the personal data provided by Iris Codes and it is deleted from their systems. A cryptographic protocol now splits the original code into three new pieces of code.
ADVERTISEMENTThese three codes, extremely difficult to decrypt, are then stored in databases owned by third parties, including the University of Berkeley, the University of Zurich, the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and NeverMind.
World is currently available in Argentina, Austria, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States.
Damien Kieran declared that the company planned to roll out the technology later in Ireland, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.
The company also hopes to reach Spain and Portugal, but those two countries temporarily banned World earlier this year in response to complaints about data privacy.
ADVERTISEMENT
