Nefarious Data Collection Masking as Public Art? An A.I. Company Has Placed Mirrored Spheres Around the World in a Massive Eye-Scanning Project
A.I. company Worldcoin has rolled out 1,500 Orbs to more than 35 cities in a bid to create digital identities for the world's citizens.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/worldcoin-orb-ai-2341500Open linkView original on kbin.social
34 replies
Copy that.
The article is bullshit click bait.
https://lemmy.world/comment/1805017
Yeah, this is nefarious data collection masking as slightly less nefarious data collection
Just hell no. Sounds like a spray paint campaign is in order. I'm gonna go post this on the anarchy subs and see how they feel about it (unless you already got there first).
Baseball bats sound more effective. Make ‘em eat the costs.
Just hide your eyes or they'll scan you before you can beat the ball
Sunglasses and a mask are still totally fine to wear nowadays. Just walk up and pretend to trip.
People trying to force social credit onto the free world.
Shiit, if you think about it, we kinda already have a social credit system in the US. It's less social I suppose, but does affect things that effect our social status, like being able to finance a car or house afforedably.
Well I look forward to hearing the endless tales of people smashing the fuck out of these, and taking the hardware to figure out how to do greater damage to the entire project.
I think these would look pretty cool in my art deco living room, and they're free too! Such a great deal ;)
Holy crap it’s Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. After that recent article about his $2 Kenyan workers it’s much harder to believe in benevolent intentions.
Any time someone creates a new coin instead of using the thousands available, it's 99.9% a scam. We don't need a new money supply for a UBI, this has been discussed to death in crypto circles for over a decade.
Hmm, based on the pictures in the article this thing is basically a camera in a shiny ball about 1ft in diameter (it appears to be about the width of 3 bricks laid side by side). It's not like a Cloud Gate-sized object. To get a scan of your irises you would have to be pretty close to it for at least a few seconds - it's not like it could get a scan if you're just walking by a few feet away. You'd have to walk up and point your face at it on purpose. The camera in it also looks fixed - I doubt it can rotate to follow you, that would be mechanically complex, expensive and prone to failure.
Based on the description, their software takes an image of your irises and reduces it to a hash value. The original image is deleted (they claim) and the hash value is stored as an ID code. It seems likely that the hash value will be unique to their software - e.g. if you wrote your own code to produce hash values from images, you would get a different number even if you had the same picture of the same eyes. So the hash value doesn't necessarily represent anything about your eyes that would be much of a privacy invasion... It's just a mathematically derived number string which is unique to their software.
It's not clear what part of this system is "AI", though my guess would be it has something to do with re-identifying your eyes next time you want to access whatever is secured with your hash code. It's really not clear how that would work... a new image of your eyes collected a year later under different lighting conditions would probably produce a different hash value, so how does this system match them, if it only records the hashes?
FWIW, I think smashing or spray painting these things, while fun ideas in the rebellious teenager sense, is probably overkill and likely to get you more attention from law enforcement than you want. But, you could probably just walk up behind it and slap a sticker or tape over the camera... they'd still have to pay someone to go out and peel it off.
Taking a picture instantly after would probably create a different hash value. The thing about hashing is that even if one bit is different between source images, the resulting hashes would look entirely different.
I suppose I could conceive of a proprietary hash algorithm that would allow for fuzzy matching of iris photos, but as you said, eyes taken years apart in different conditions wouldn't match the original hash. Or falsely match similar looking eyes. It's not like this system allows them to get high resolution perfectly lit iris photos, after all.
The whole thing sounds dubious, and I suspect AI is mentioned solely to secure investor funding, much like how several years back everything mentioned Blockchain.
According to their website, the image is normalised in such a way that taking multiple pictures of the same iris, even under vastly different lighting conditions, will always generate the same hash.
The data collection may well be nefarious, but this is hatchling spying on people. It's roughly equivalent to having desks with fingerprint scanners. You won't be scanned unwittingly and against your will. It's not even remotely possible, from a technical point of view.
What the hell is this? How can they even do this without getting deleted.
I'm not sure I understood it correctly. Do people just need to just look at the mirrored surface to get scanned, and they get a coin?
You don't know and don't have an account your bad! We have your eyes now!
Or do people need to read a privacy policy and accept everything before they get scanned?
Well it's not magic at least https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-inside-worldcoin-biometric-imaging-device
It's not a 360 camera. People have to be able to look at the dark spot where the glass for the cameras are.
Cool now we know how to approach and destroy these abominations.
Don't destroy them. Ship them to me so I can convert them into stationary cameras for my front door and yard with my self hosted security system.
Eyes for the Eye God!
So this company has ties with OpenAI? That is kinda concerning …
Another shitcoin lol !!!
This article described some concerning methods they used to develop and deploy the system...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/
The absolute absurdity of a news article on nefarious data collection requiring that I enable JS to read it, just so that it can load a ridiculous number of trackers.
Have none of you ever travelled?! They already have our retinal scans...
I have traveled and have no idea what you're talking about.
What th’ . . . are you kids on _dope?!_
The article is misrepresenting the whole thing. It's voluntary, the devices are not just randomly picking up iris scans.
Click bait at it's finest.
BUT WE WANT TO FREAK OUT AND BE AFRAID FOREVER : The Internet