Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, today announced that Worldcoin, an iris-scanning cryptocurrency, has started offering services globally. However, depending on where users are located, the degree to which Worldcoin really fulfills its promise of a “new global digital currency” may differ significantly.

On Monday, Worldcoin announced that it has started formally distributing both its “WLD” cryptocurrency tokens and its “World ID” decentralized identity protocol. Users can submit their iris scan to a nearby “orb” device in one of the 35 cities where Worldcoin is accepted and get a portion of WLD “simply for being human.” Since the firm’s founding in 2019, two million volunteers’ World IDs have purportedly been verified at orbs in 30 different countries, while many in developing nations have complained they never actually received any money in exchange for giving the corporation their eyeprints.

The project, which, like India’s Aadhaar, uses a spooky basketball-sized metal orb to verify people’s identities through eye scans, could help distinguish humans from robot armies and serve as a unique identifier to facilitate the tech world’s preferred method of economic redistribution: universal basic income, according to Altman.

“Worldcoin is an attempt at global scale alignment, the journey will be challenging and the outcome is uncertain,” co-founders Alex Blania and Altman wrote. “But finding new ways to broadly share the coming technological prosperity is a critical challenge of our time.”

During its beta phase, the business claims it was able to sign up more than 40,000 people every week for its World ID program. Worldcoin claims that by raising its global orb capacity to 1,500, it will be able to handle five times as many sign-ups. When approached for comment, Worldcoin referred Gizmodo to the creators’ announcement letter.

Top tech investors like Andreessen Horowitz and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the popular startup, in part to address the alleged age of AI-amped economic disparity expedited by businesses like Altman’s OpenAI. Supporters of universal basic income, including Altman and former Democratic presidential candidate turned cryptocurrency shill Andrew Yang, think it might give people who might be replaced or rendered obsolete by AI systems a stable economic base. In the instance of Worldcoin, that redistribution idea depends on the performance of its WLD token. According to CoinMarketCap

However, the United States is one significant market where Wordcoin’s redistribution vision won’t function as intended. According to reports, it is now too hazardous for the company to completely operate in one of the home counties of its creator because of uncertainty brought on by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent assault on cryptocurrencies. Altman, who has spent the majority of the last six months deftly influencing US lawmakers to take a moderate approach to AI legislation, appeared less interested in taking on crypto authorities in a struggle that would become more and more difficult.

“When we started thinking about this, we didn’t think it would end up as ‘world minus the US coin’ and here we are,” Altman said in an interview with the Financial Times. “I’d say there’s 95 per cent of the world’s population not in the US. The US does not make or break a project like this.”

Blania, the company’s other co-founder and CEO of Tools for Humanity, would rather the public not associate Worldcoin with the crypto industry at all.

“Crypto is hopefully a label that will get dropped over the coming years anyways, and it’s just essentially the technology that you use to build certain products,” Blania said during an interview with Bloomberg News.

Worldcoin off to a rocky start

On its way to a formal launch, Worldcoin has to overcome a number of obstacles. Hundreds of complaints from Orb customers worldwide who claimed they were never reimbursed after giving up their Iris scans were highlighted in a BuzzFeed News investigation into the company. The employees in charge of persuading people to look up at the $5,000 devices, known as orbs, have similarly complained of harassment, arrests, and unpaid bills.

According to a new report, the Brazilian Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is said to be built with a function that allows the administration to freeze user cash and modify balances. The information became public after Pedro Magalhaes, a well-known blockchain developer and the creator of Iora Labs, was able to decode the CBDC’s technological underpinnings.

The Application Programming Interface (API), which is accessible on the monetary authority’s Github account, was examined by Magalhaes. His revelation revealed a potentially contentious control tool for the Brazilian government, but there has been an unsettling lack of response from authorities.

Brazilian journalist and cryptocurrency expert Vini Barbosa confirmed the information on social media. He verified Magalhaes’ judgment as a reporter for the crypto-focused news source Portal Do Bitcoin by claiming that he had had direct contact with the Brazilian government.

Barbosa clarified on Twitter, saying that according to the Central Bank’s statement, the authority to “freeze or arrest amounts” within the system is consistent with current Brazilian law.

Magalhaes at first thought that the freeze capability would be restricted to DeFi or CeFi activities, where a balance freeze could be necessary to carry out a smart contract activity. Magalhaes revealed the issue on LinkedIn for educational purposes. He was told, nevertheless, that the central bank had the authority to use this capability as and when it was judged essential.

This is very scary giving the government the ability to just take your money, or freeze it whenever they please.

Brazilians are worried about this because of their nation’s turbulent financial history. Their worries are not unfounded, as the Brazilian president once imposed an 18-month financial freeze on all Brazilians in the 1990s.

Magalhaes supports more openness and education of the general people as a means of limiting the central bank’s enormous control over the CBDC.

For more information on this story:

Sen. Bernie Sanders and a group of congressional Democrats conducted a seven-month investigation that resulted in a shocking report that was released on Wednesday. The report revealed that private tax preparation companies have been secretly sharing sensitive personal information with tech giants for years, a practice that the lawmakers deemed outrageous and possibly illegal.

The report, spearheaded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the Senate and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) in the House, notes that TaxAct, H&R Block and TaxSlayer “used computer code — known as pixels — to send data to Meta and Google.”

“While most websites use pixels, it is particularly reckless for online tax preparation websites to use them on webpages where tax return information is entered unless further steps are taken to ensure that the pixels do not access sensitive information,” the lawmakers’ 54-page report states.

“Yet, the tax prep companies described this as a ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘common industry practice.’”

The three major tax preparation companies, who have vehemently opposed efforts to create a free Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax filing program, have acknowledged exchanging taxpayer data by using Google and Meta Pixel capabilities.

“The Meta Pixel and other Meta tools used by TaxAct collected far more information than was previously reported,” the report reads.

“In addition to taxpayers’ filing status, approximate [adjusted gross income], approximate refund amount, and names of dependents, the Pixel collected approximate federal tax owed and buttons that were clicked and names of text-entry forms that the taxpayer navigated to.”

“H&R Block and TaxSlayer also revealed an extensive list of data shared via the Meta Pixel, including transmitting information on whether taxpayers had visited pages for many revealing tax situations,” the report adds.

“Although the tax prep companies and Big Tech firms claimed that all shared data was anonymous, the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] and experts have indicated that the data could easily be used to identify individuals, or to create a dossier on them that could be used for targeted advertising or other purposes.”

Facebook’s privacy policy states that it “may retain” data gathered with the Meta Pixel for up to two years.

The disclosures in the Senate report constitute “a five-alarm fire” for taxpayer privacy, according to David Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and a former head of consumer protection at the FTC.

“On a scale from one to 10, this is a 15,” said Vladeck. “This is as great as any privacy breach that I’ve seen other than exploiting kids.”

The lawmakers alerted key federal agencies to their findings in a letter on Wednesday and demanded prosecution for “any company or individuals who violated the law.”

“The findings of this report reveal a shocking breach of taxpayer privacy by tax prep companies and by Big Tech firms that appeared to violate taxpayers’ rights and may have violated taxpayer privacy law,” the lawmakers wrote.

“The Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice should fully investigate this matter.”

“We also welcome the recent IRS announcement of a free, direct file pilot next year, which will give taxpayers the option to file taxes without sharing their data with untrustworthy and incompetent tax preparation firms,” they added.

SOURCES: SENATE OVERSIGHT REPORT, POLITICO, CNN, FACEBOOK