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Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

capitalfm.co.ke

21–30 of 379 posts

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#21

Why would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny – whether that's market scrutiny from the SEC/etc or privacy scrutiny under GDPR and other legislation well understood by SV lawyers. Good on Kenya for holding Worldcoin to account. It'll be interesting to see what they do as they enter the "and find out" phase.

I think most of SV is pretty crypto disillusioned at this point.

It feels as though the only people into it in SV in 2023 are the people shilling it, which are not that profitable of a cohort after all.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#22

Why would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny – whether that's market scrutiny from the SEC/etc or privacy scrutiny under GDPR and other legislation well understood by SV lawyers. Good on Kenya for holding Worldcoin to account. It'll be interesting to see what they do as they enter the "and find out" phase.

> Why would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny Iris scanning is already widely used in the U.S. and hasn't received much scrutiny. It's in the news all the time, e.g. with the owners of Madison Square Garden using it to keep their political enemies from going to concerts. You probably use it every time you get on an airplane already. Even LinkedIn uses CLEAR to…

> You probably use it every time you get on an airplane already.

False. More importantly, however, this is an example of the "you're already doing it so it's not a big deal" fallacy.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#23
post #12

Half-baked effort to hypnotize the global south. A GPT would be presented as the totalitarian “superintelligence”, and non-native speakers would have a hard time challenging any of it.

> the global south

Care to elaborate what you mean by "the global south"?

EDIT: Downvoted for asking a question? Did all the StackOverflow mods come to HN?

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#24
post #12

Half-baked effort to hypnotize the global south. A GPT would be presented as the totalitarian “superintelligence”, and non-native speakers would have a hard time challenging any of it.

This comment confuses me. What exactly was the half baked effort to hypnotize the global south? Raiding Worldcoin?

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#25
post #12

Half-baked effort to hypnotize the global south. A GPT would be presented as the totalitarian “superintelligence”, and non-native speakers would have a hard time challenging any of it.

> the global south Care to elaborate what you mean by "the global south"? EDIT: Downvoted for asking a question? Did all the StackOverflow mods come to HN?

[deleted]

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#26
post #12

Half-baked effort to hypnotize the global south. A GPT would be presented as the totalitarian “superintelligence”, and non-native speakers would have a hard time challenging any of it.

> the global south Care to elaborate what you mean by "the global south"? EDIT: Downvoted for asking a question? Did all the StackOverflow mods come to HN?

It's a reasonably common concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_Sout...

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#28
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just how bad this is would depend on how they stored the data, I guess. Why does it feel like they probably keep WAY more data than they need instead of just the hash? Glad they’ve been shut down at least.

I bet there's a really well understood data store that contains minimal data and meets various anonymity proofs. And then a tag-manager implementation with MixPanel, Intercom, Amplitude, Heap, FullStory, and Segment, all receiving every interaction with a full JSON object describing the current state of the application and user.

Ugh. This is probably the true nature of the thing, it's shocking how this happens at nearly every company I've been at. Eng is super concerned with privacy and security, and then as soon as Marketing gets a hold of it, it's all coated in 6 layers of analytics for funnel tracking leads.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#29
post #18

Why would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny – whether that's market scrutiny from the SEC/etc or privacy scrutiny under GDPR and other legislation well understood by SV lawyers. Good on Kenya for holding Worldcoin to account. It'll be interesting to see what they do as they enter the "and find out" phase.

Kenya is a reasonable choice to launch a project like this. Among African nations, Kenya is very connected to USA and UBI. Altman already had OpenAI work in Kenya. It has both a stable government/economy and also high poverty and rural population. It has ~5% of Africa's population, so if you just picked a random place with a lot of people to operate, it's unsurprising to land in Kenya. https://www.givedirectly.org st…

OpenAI work there because labour is really cheap.

I don't think this is at all about UBI, if anything "competing" with Give Directly (who are doing truly excellent) would require more work and justification of Worldcoin's approach.

I do suspect the real reason is much more exploitative.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#30
post #12

Half-baked effort to hypnotize the global south. A GPT would be presented as the totalitarian “superintelligence”, and non-native speakers would have a hard time challenging any of it.

> the global south Care to elaborate what you mean by "the global south"? EDIT: Downvoted for asking a question? Did all the StackOverflow mods come to HN?

As the other commenter linked, it generally refers to "developing"/underdeveloped countries. Aka, countries with lower per capita GDP.
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