As per Monday reports of a local news organisation in Kenya, police raided the Nairobi warehouse of Worldcoin last Saturday, 5 August.
The identity and crypto protocol has recently been in the news for its feature of iris scans to verify users.
Worldcoin is co-founded by Sam Altman who is known for being the OpenAI CEO. His latest project was launched in March this year, aimed at solving income inequality and online identity authentication.
Recently, Worldcoin’s mainnet went live in July when its $WLD token was also launched in an airdrop. The frenzy around its eye-scanning physical ‘orb’ feature spiked the token by over 60% within hours of launch.
However, last week, the Kenyan government suspended Worldcoin’s operations citing security concerns. This was soon followed by investigations into the activities of the company.
While the company stands firm in saying that it has not stored any data, privacy experts think otherwise and worry that sensitive data gathered from scanning a person’s iris might get into the wrong hands. Taking action on the same: “The officers backed by multi-agency officials went to the offices along Mombasa Road armed with a search warrant and broke in Saturday before leaving with machines they believe stores data gathered by the firm.”
Media outlet Kahawatungu further reported that the raid was conducted under the supervision of the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC), Immaculate Kassait. According to the commissioner, Tools for Humanity, which is the parent company of Worldcoin, failed to disclose its true intentions during registration.
The police team then took the data to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations headquarters for investigations on the same, said the report.
The Ministry of the Interior had suspended the project’s operations in the country last week over “a number of legitimate regulatory concerns” around the project which was found by ODPC in a preliminary review.
Just a few days after the launch, the UK’s data regulator, Information Commissions Office (ICO), also announced that it would be looking into the project. Similar actions have also been taken by authorities in France where the country’s privacy watchdog CNIL tagged the legality of Worldcoin‘s biometric data collection as “questionable”.
The project is also facing regulatory issues in the US. While its new token has been made available in 35 cities across 20 countries, it has not been launched in the States yet.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had also laid out the major risks of Worldcoin’s eye-scanning physical ‘orb’ and its Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) system of construction when the feature was making quite a buzz in the industry.
As the use of biometric data continues to raise eyebrows, the company insists that it uses artificial intelligence to create unique codes to represent the scans. It thereby complies with “very, very local and very specific rules and regulations in each of the markets where there’s an Orb”, said the Tools for Humanity’s chief communications officer Rebecca Hahn.
However, $WLD has been down by over 37% in price since its all-time high of $3.30 which was hit on 24 July 2023. At the time of press, it was changing hands for $2.07, holding a market capitalisation of $247million, as per CoinGecko.
