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Privacy The Almighty Buck

In Argentina, Facing Surging Inflation, 500K Accept Worldcoin's Offer of $50 for Iris-Scanning (restofworld.org) 67

Wednesday Rest of World noticed an overlooked tech story in Argentina: Olga de León looked confused as she walked out of a nightclub on the edge of Buenos Aires on a recent Tuesday afternoon. She had just had her iris scanned. "No one told me what they'll do with my eye," de León, 57, told Rest of World. "But I did this out of need." De León, who lives off the $95 pension she receives from the state, had been desperate for money. Persuaded by her nephew, she agreed to have one of her irises scanned by Worldcoin, Sam Altman's blockchain project. In exchange, she received nearly $50 worth of WLD, the company's cryptocurrency.

De León is one of about half a million Argentines who have handed their biometric data over to Worldcoin. Beaten down by the country's 288% inflation rate and growing unemployment, they have flocked to Worldcoin Orb verification hubs, eager to get the sign-up crypto bonus offered by the company. A network of intermediaries — who earn a commission from every iris scan — has lured many into signing up for the practice in Argentina, where data privacy laws remain weak. But as the popularity of Worldcoin skyrockets in the country, experts have sounded the alarm about the dangers of giving away biometric data. Two provinces are now pushing for legal investigations. "Seeing that [iris scans have] been banned in European countries, shouldn't we be trying to stop it, too?" Javier Smaldone, a software consultant and digital security expert, told Rest of World.

Last month Worldcoin's web site announced that more than 10 million people in 160 countries had created a World ID and compatible wallet (performing 75 million transactions) — and that 5,195,475 people had also verified their World ID using Worldcoin's iris-scanning Orb.

But the article notes a big drop in the number of countries even allowing Worldcoin's iris-scanning — from 25 to just eight. While in less than a year Worldcoin opened nearly 60 centers across Argentina...
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In Argentina, Facing Surging Inflation, 500K Accept Worldcoin's Offer of $50 for Iris-Scanning

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  • This is disgusting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @06:44AM (#64451120)

    I consider this to be one step removed from paying people for their organs. It wouldn't be at all out of place as a major plot point in a dystopian SF movie. I hope Altman dies in a fire.

    • I don't wish him harm but many people feel like he's not on Team Humanity.

      Even Napoleon was merely exiled.

      • Have you seen Sam Altman? He looks like Bryan Kohberger and Dennis Reynold's doppleganger, what do you expect?

        • Have you seen Sam Altman? He looks like Bryan Kohberger and Dennis Reynold's doppleganger, what do you expect?

          I didn't think Sam Altman was a real person. Partly the name, "alt-man" and partly his uncanny-valley face. The dude looks like he was hallucinated by an AI.

          Now, I know we shouldn't judge people by their appearances. I am judging him (if he is a real person) by what he does. He does bad things and this iris scanning is one of them.

    • I consider this to be one step removed from paying people for their organs. It wouldn't be at all out of place as a major plot point in a dystopian SF movie. I hope Altman dies in a fire.

      You beat me to it.

      Also, intentionally or not, this is exploitation of desperate people. People are desperate and will give up the things sufficiently informed people wouldn't under normal circumstances. That's literally exploitation, exploitation of their bodies.

      Dehumanizing AF, and utterly colonialist.

      • I'm required to work 40 hours or more per week so I can have a place to live and food to eat, among other things.

        How is that not also exploitation?

        • I'm required to work 40 hours or more per week so I can have a place to live and food to eat, among other things.

          How is that not also exploitation?

          It is not because you have a choice to go anywhere and life off the land. No one has the obligation to provide you with a modern form of life.

          For you, or me, to have something to eat or have things we want or need, we have to give something in return.

          To confuse that with exploitation (real exploitation), Jesus F Christ, talk about privilege crying about first world problems.

  • Waiting to push your Orwellian shit on society until you know they’re desperate enough to not say No, is the kind of shit Civil Wars are made of.

    Citizens need to wise the fuck up, put down the political pom poms, and learn to vote better. Greed keeps winning, and citizens keep losing otherwise.

    Gonna be rich hearing the excuses as to how this helps address rampant inflation. After Workdcoin gets their data, they’ll give a fuck about Argentina about as much as the Olympics care about the mess th

  • The quote "who lives off the $95" is meaningless without a time frame. Sure if you live in Argentina you will know how often the pension is paid, the rest of us are left guessing. Here the pension is paid every fortnight, but I'm sure our standard is not used by everyone around the world.
    • it's usually monthly, at least that is what it was when I lived there.
    • There is also the problem of purchase power parity, as $95 may buy more things in Argentina than in US. It would be useful to say if someone can buy their groceries for a month with this money or something like that. Converting by purchase power parity using available data is not even very useful, as the data are annual, and with 288% annual inflation rate, they are already outdated.
      • My rent was $80 in the last appartment i lived there, but no value can be taken as point of reference, $95 is definitely not enough to live, but on the other hand, the person is not old enough to be retired, the retirement age was is 60 for women, and 65 for men, which can change soon if the Ley de Bases bill is approved on the senate
    • Here the pension is paid every fortnight, but I'm sure our standard is not used by everyone around the world.

      Im sure your standard is not used either, since most people probably have no idea what a fortnight is, or assume you work as a Fortnite developer. ;)

      • by ukoda ( 537183 )
        Do I really have to supply a Wikipedia link for a common English word in daily use around the world? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        A fortnight is a unit of time equal to 14 days (two weeks). The word derives from the Old English term fowertene niht, meaning "fourteen nights" (or "fourteen days", since the Anglo-Saxons counted by nights).
  • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @08:29AM (#64451272) Homepage
    by pumping more one-time money to every person. If there was a definition of predatory company, this is it.
  • I'm slowly beginning to hate technology,
  • Hopefully this is the start of another worldwide demonstration of how useless biometrics are for security. Once enough people are using it to "identify" "you", there will exist someone who can eventually fake the input. Fingerprint scanners were fooled from nearly day one.
  • by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Monday May 06, 2024 @10:31AM (#64451528)

    What's the point of this? I think of the iris scanning technology to be kind of a gimmick... I'm not sure what you'd do with the iris scans of a bunch of broke, desperate people anyways. So is this just to artificially inflate the usage numbers of a sham currency? What's that supposed to prove?

  • This sounds like something silly out of a Bill Gibson novel which does not translate outside fantasy stories. Their target is a demographic least able to use it.
  • I'm not sure where it comes from, maybe from the many dictatorships that ruled the country.

    We have LPRs, cameras recording everywhere, the list of voters is essentially public, you can check anyone's debt with a simple query to the central bank, and whenever something bad happens, people just ask for more surveillance and more draconian measures to be applied.

    Americans tend to think bad things will happen if the government knows, but we've had so many incompetent governments that I think deep down we belie

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