101–110 of 165 posts
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Because the government has more power over you. Thus, they deserve more scrutiny and suspicion.
Isn't it the case that companies are hiding in the government's shadow? Who enables a government to exert power over its people?
Mostly the police and military, not the companies.
Even if you 100% believe in your heart that Altman would never do anything negative with these scans that doesn't mean someone else won't if/when they get access to them. People may trusted 23andMe with their genetic data but now no one knows who will end up owning it and why the buyer believes buying the data is profitable. https://wydaily.com/latest/regional-national/2025/05/08/23an...
It's kind of different in that with 23andMe they know your name and genetic data. With Worldcoin you don't give your name and they just get a photo of your eyes.
The first wants one data breach anywhere to last a lifetime and the second is a bigger media story because people believe what we can do with the dna 23andme collects is more than reality.
Even if you 100% believe in your heart that Altman would never do anything negative with these scans that doesn't mean someone else won't if/when they get access to them. People may trusted 23andMe with their genetic data but now no one knows who will end up owning it and why the buyer believes buying the data is profitable. https://wydaily.com/latest/regional-national/2025/05/08/23an...
And on the other hand, I do wish there was a way to distinguish real humans from bots on the Internet. I think it’s only a matter of time until the web becomes useless thanks to AI. What’s a better solution?
Even if you 100% believe in your heart that Altman would never do anything negative with these scans that doesn't mean someone else won't if/when they get access to them. People may trusted 23andMe with their genetic data but now no one knows who will end up owning it and why the buyer believes buying the data is profitable. https://wydaily.com/latest/regional-national/2025/05/08/23an...
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What are the consequences?
That you can be identified, cataloged and controlled, potentially. We have the technology to create heaven or hell depending on who controls it…
As you say, the future can become heaven or hell.
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When talking about government surveillance, people often ask some version of 'well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?'. My response is always, 'It's not that I don't trust our current government, I don't trust all future governments that come after this one'. I hope given the recent events of having some hired thugs rifle through government databases (including the OPM, which supposedly has…
I see no reason to trust the current government, nor any of the previous ones in my lifetime.
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What does a picture of your eye allow that fingerprints, face scans and other passport biometrics that have already been collected and linked do not? Honest question.
Yes the government and or private companies don’t have a copy of my fingerprints and I’d honestly rather they didn’t have pictures of my face on record either. Just because we’ve become accustomed to these breaches of our privacy doesn’t mean they are good.
100% this. The fact that the governments and corporations have enough information at their fingertips to identify people from chance photos is, IMO, not good.
However that genie is out of the bottle and there is no way to get it back in. Cameras are ubiquitous and one can get a decent quality fingerprint from store camera footage. Any time I do eye exam the doctor takes an eye scan and uploads it somewhere. Passport biometrics are becoming required and most countries will match it with a face scan on border crossing. And this is just a tip of the iceberg.
I would like to be wrong, but IMO the only solution to the government being able to track anyone they like (or, rather, do not like) is via legislation, not technology. And with various 3-letter agencies being routinely allowed special access "because security" this path is unlikely to be viable either. My 2c.
The more biometric tech converges on the ability to get a cryptographic hash of one's body, the further it retreats from the kind of thing that a layperson will trust. You end up with a root of trust that It needs to be the kind of thing that lets Alice assert that this key goes with Bob just after she shook Bob's hand in meatspace. Something where, in order for Bob to have two identities according to Alice, he'll have to meet her in meatspace twice and manage to have her not notice that she's already met him once before. PGP key signing parties were pretty much there, they just came too early (and not enough work was done to teach the masses about them).
The web becomes more of a dark forest with each passing day. Eventually the cost of maintaining your part of the trust graph will be lower than the cost of getting screwed by some root of trust that you can't influence or verify. I'm sad to say that I think the point where these lines cross is significantly down and to the right of where we are.
Biometric data is valuable. Assuming that Musk's DOGE crew copied data obtained from US gov agencies, they may have also obtained biometric data of EU citizens. At least some countries have shared citizens' fingerprints with the US. Not just Visa Waiver Program applicants' but as I understand, previous government of Poland made a deal to share all citizens' fingerprints. And these are collected from anyone renewing t…
In most cases the most biometric data is your photo and I guess height?
So beginning to normalize the collection of eyeball data as a thing is a pretty significant escalation.
Meanwhile, in reality, banks have solved proof of humanity, identity (KYC), and financial services for a long time. Any account in the world can be proven human by making a debit/credit card transaction from a card with a matching name. For the first time, you can now give your biometrics to OpenAI to do nothing more than you already can. This is just a pure cult of personality.
I can only assume that you don’t work in financial technology if you believe that KYC is a solved problem. Proving authenticity in an increasingly diasporic society is difficult. We should seek to either reduce or embrace entropy in the design of our systems. You either want systems which prove there are no Sybil attacks, or you manufacture halls of mirrors. This is a continuous battle, there’s no panacea here, even…