The project, led by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, Spain and Germany’s regulators cracked the world (formerly WorldCoin) that instructed it to delete Iris scans of users collected in both countries. The latest lawsuit against the company adds a series of controversies introduced by the project in 2023 since the project was introduced. The world requires people to scan their eyes to identify purposes, which can pose a privacy threat to users – unlike passwords, biometric technology cannot be changed.
On Friday, German regulators issued detailed directives for Altman’s Web3 project. In the EU, the world project is headquartered in Erlangen, Bavaria. The Bavarian Data Protection Supervision Office (BAYLDA) said in an official statement that Altman must align the world’s operations with the EU’s data protection laws.
“According to today’s decision, we are implementing European Basic Rights Standards to support data subjects in cases with highly complex technical requirements and legal conditions. All users who provide their iris data for World Coin will have unlimited opportunities to perform their wipes in the future. ex-rights,” said Baylda president Michael Will.
Spain’s Data Protection Observation Day AEPD also instructed that all biometric data collected worldwide by the country so far must be deleted.
APED said it had investigated the project with Baylda, which showed that it violated EU general data protection regulations. In Spain, the world project has been subject to a temporary ban, and the High Court in March maintained the High Court.
This ambitious project was first conceived in 2019, claiming that it eliminates the need for individuals to share personal details with web protocols to interact online by providing world ID. It claims to introduce more privacy when accessing the internet. To publish these IDs, the project collected scans of iris scanning human eyes through a machine designed by the company.
As of Friday, the project’s website showed that 343,904 unique human verifications have been processed over the past seven days. The data on the site also claims that the project’s app has gained more than 20 million users so far, and more than 9.2 million unique people have become part of its ecosystem.
In August, Colombia’s Industria y comercio (SIC) launched a prosecution process without formally charging the project to determine whether the world violates the country’s personal data protection regime. Hong Kong blocked the project in May on privacy concerns.
