Regulators in Spain and Germany have cracked down on World (formerly WorldCoin), a project led by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and directed it to delete iris scans of users collected in both countries. The latest action against the firm adds to a series of controversies the project has faced since it was unveiled in 2023. The world requires people to scan their eyes for identification purposes, which can pose a privacy threat to users – unlike passwords, biometrics cannot be changed.
On Friday, German regulators issued detailed instructions for Altmann’s Web3 project. In the European Union, the World Project is headquartered in Erlangen, Bavaria. In an official statement, the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision (BayLDA) said that Altmann will have to align World’s operations with EU data protection laws.
“With today’s decision, we are applying European fundamental rights standards in favor of data subjects in a technically demanding and legally highly complex case. Michael Will, president of BYLDA, said all users who have provided their iris data to WorldCoin will have an unrestricted opportunity to enforce their right to erasure in the future.
Spain’s data protection watchdog AEPD has also directed that all biometric data collected so far by World in the country should be deleted.
APED said it has investigated the project together with BayLDA and the results show that the project is in breach of the EU General Data Protection Regulation. In Spain, the World Project is under a temporary ban, which was upheld by the High Court there in March.
The ambitious project, which was first conceived in 2019, claims it eliminates the need for individuals to share personal details with web protocols to interact online by offering a World ID. It claims to bring more privacy while accessing the internet. To issue these IDs, the project collects iris scans of people’s eyes through a machine designed by a company called Orbs.
As of Friday, the project’s website shows that 343,904 unique human verifications have been processed over the past seven-day period. Data on the website also claims that the project’s app has attracted more than 20 million users so far, while more than 9.2 million unique humans are already part of its ecosystem.
In August, Colombia’s Superintendentia de Industria y Comercio (SIC) launched an indictment process without formally charging the project to determine whether World was violating the country’s personal data protection regime. Hong Kong halted the project in May, citing privacy concerns.
