Sam Altman’s Eye-Scanning “Orb” Is The Google-Street-View Of Our Bodies And Minds

Updated Dec. 4, 2024 at 7:25 p.m.*

–Analysis–

SÃO PAULO — I arrived late at the elegant house in the Vila Nova Conceição neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil; the event was about to start. A handful of journalists were already gathered around a table with coffee, tea, cookies and snacks at the back of the house. But the tension was palpable; those tasked with “selling” the product to the press knew that they were facing a significant challenge.

When questions poured in — accompanied by few answers — it became increasingly clear that the Brazilian launch of World was prompting far more questions than applause.

Starting Nov. 13, World, an initiative created by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, began scanning the eyes of Brazilians to add to a database that, according to the company, already contains biometric data from more than 7 million individuals. They started with 10 locations in the city of São Paulo — in shopping malls and with street stands.

Biometric data collection

I’ll spare you the adjectives, because the story speaks for itself. Readers are welcome to use some of the concepts I usually use around in my column (techno-oligarchy, neocolonialism, techno-feudalism, etc.).

This is how World is currently promoting its work and purpose: it wants to create a global identity that ensures that the person using it is a human being.

The idea, conceived by founders Sam Altman, Alex Blania and Max Novendstern and financed from the outset by investor Andreessen Horowitz, responds to the growing difficulty computers face in verifying whether a user is a person or a robot. Essentially, with the evolution of AI, those captcha tests are becoming increasingly obsolete.

We have to trust that this is true because there is no oversight body.

World created a machine called Orb — a black sphere designed to resemble something out of a science fiction movie — to scan each person’s iris to provide them with a unique identity. According to an extensive report from BuzzFeed News, Orb uses a thermal scanner to check people’s body temperature, a 3D camera to map faces, and high-resolution cameras to capture videos and images of bodies, faces and irises — all to prove that it is indeed a real person and not just a photo.

The biometric data is reportedly not stored by the organization; only encoded values known as hashes are kept across various servers at universities so that “the iris cannot be reconstructed.” We have to trust that this is true because, as with other tech companies, there is no oversight body that can verify if this promise is indeed fulfilled.

Solving whose problems?

But the issue lies not only in the lack of transparency regarding how data is stored and destroyed or with whom the company shares it — with BuzzFeed’s report indicating that World’s data-sharing contract allowed it to share user data with third parties as it saw fit.

The problem begins with the narrative that the organization wants to sell.

To start with, this “new” narrative conceals the reason for creating the company: to form a highly valuable cryptocurrency that would be widely distributed among humanity, potentially even creating a “universal basic income” through this cryptocurrency.

Altman’s engineers developed the Orb to figure out a way to protect World from fraud. Two years later, the application of this technology is evident: a service that can guarantee that a person can be verified as human before entering a Zoom call.

I asked the presenters if there was any possibility of selling this service later on to tech companies. “We do not rule that out for later,” was their response. But then we return to the narrative being sold. Instead of admitting they have a good product — the captcha service — and wanting to profit significantly from it, World says they are trying to “solve a huge problem” for humanity.

Operating in a “crypto paradise”

Back in that room on a hot day in São Paulo, after spending their time trying to convince us of this narrative, they played a video celebrating human wonders featuring images of children running and happy women smiling. None of this was necessary. With Donald Trump’s recent reelection as U.S. president, we have reached crypto paradise, and World intends to be another player in that space.

Currently, it operates solely through accumulation: those who allow the company to scan their iris receive more than 300 Brazilian Reals (about ) in “tokens” (25 tokens) added to their account created for identity use registered in a type of virtual wallet you must download when creating your World ID. Theoretically, withdrawing money requires just making a money transfer by providing an email and an ID number. In other countries, payments have taken months or never arrived at all.

When millions of people hold these tokens, it will be easy to create real uses for this money.

My press colleagues and I asked two or three times what the plan was for turning this currency into one with actual value but received no answers.

One presenter explained that some services might be made available through an app for payment with World. The idea — at least as far as I can understand — is that when millions of people hold these tokens, it will be easy to create real uses for this money.

This is what venture capitalists who funded this project are betting on: according to World’s press office, they hold 25% of all coins as a return on investment.

Global South controversy

For Altman and Blania, benefits are twofold: in addition to creating the largest biometric database in the world — which has undeniable value — they established Tools for Humanity which “provides services” for World such as developing applications and websites and tools used by the nonprofit organization managing the database (World Foundation).

Altman presides over this company, which has investors from various cryptocurrency firms, according to Valor Econômico newspaper: a16z crypto, Bain Capital Crypto, Blockchain Capital and Distributed Global. Furthermore since its inception, it has received 4 million in investments.

Before arriving in Brazil, World had already generated significant controversy by paying to scan irises in poor countries such as Indonesia, Zimbabwe and Kenya — where an inquiry was launched and where authorities had repeatedly ordered an end to operations until compliance was achieved.

World has also been targeted by regulators in countries such as France, Germany, Argentina and Hong Kong. This year, its activities were suspended in Spain and Portugal.

Here in Brazil, its operational start has already caught the attention of the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD). According to Bloomberg Línea, the ANDP initiated an oversight process “to obtain more information from World about its project relaunch aimed at scanning human irises for identity verification in order to assess its compliance with Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD).”

A week earlier Damien Kieran, vice president of Data Protection at Tools for Humanity, toured Brasília, where he met with regulators from the Ministry of Science and Technology and representatives from ANPD.

Privatizing our bodies

“The concerns are less about privacy from an anonymity standpoint and more about potential secondary uses of unique identifiers generated computationally,” says Rafael Zanatta director of the NGO Data Privacy Brazil. For him, this solution is very ingenious; “perhaps it is the most ingenious solution in the world for digital identities.”

But first comes digital sovereignty: “We are advancing toward privatizing structural functions for transactions which is assigning and verifying whether someone is indeed human since we have few oversight instruments on a global scale.”

Zanatta says that to be considered truly transparent “the company should have a permanent council made up of representatives from society capable of evaluating engineering solutions from an ethical perspective.”

World’s entire narrative relies on Silicon Valley’s good-guyism.

There’s another broader issue that Zanatta does not address, perhaps out of politeness. World’s entire narrative relies on Silicon Valley’s good-guyism — a line of reasoning that made sense 20 years ago but no longer holds water today.

Ultimately, what World wants to do is exactly what Google did when it sent its cars equipped with cameras onto streets around the world capturing unprecedentedly large portions of global streets without asking anyone’s permission. It created an unparalleled database upon which it can now capitalize.

With its narrative of “helping humanity,” World extends this logic into human bodies bringing digital world limits — controllable, privatisable and marketable — into our bodies and our eyes.

*Originally published November 27, 2024, this article was updated Dec. 4, 2024 with enriched media