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In this photo illustration, Worldcoin logo is seen on a smartphone screen.
Sam Altman wants to scan the eyeballs of every single person on Earth with an orb-shaped scanner and then pay them with cryptocurrency. This eye-raising proposition is called Worldcoin — also the name of the crypto coin in question — and seeks to solve a problem straight from science fiction: In the future, what if we can’t tell humans and robots apart?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this strange initiative has received pushback from governments around the world concerned about the biometric privacy of their citizens. Its operations were shut down in Spain and Portugal in March and in Hong Kong in May. It was investigated by Kenyan authorities who later dropped the probe.
Worldcoin’s ability to operate in Europe will be determined in the coming weeks when the Bavarian data protection authority is set to rule on whether it’s compliant with GDPR, the European data privacy law.
The company says that about 6.5 million people worldwide have gotten scanned. That includes people in the US, where there are five locations where people can visit an orb and get their eyeball scanned: Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Palo Alto, and San Francisco. It has not been widely scrutinized by US regulators, but that could change if Europe takes a strong position on Altman’s side hustle.