World: Brazil bans iris scan against cryptocurrency

The Brazilian data protection authority Autoridade Nacional de Proteção de Dados (ANPD) has banned the US company Tools for Humanity from offering iris scans for a fee. The authority argues that financial compensation influences people's free will.

The US company Tools For Humanity (TFH) has founded the World project, which combines the Ethereum-based layer 2 cryptocurrency Worldcoin with a biometric identification system. The project has set up its biometric database for this purpose.

Anyone who wants to use the cryptocurrency World, which until a few months ago was still called Worldcoin, has to create an ID and have their iris scanned with a specially developed scanner called Orb. This is not just about identifying a person, but also about ensuring that a face, for example in a video conference, belongs to a real person and has not been generated by artificial intelligence.

Money influences the free decision

To motivate users to participate, they receive a few tokens of the cryptocurrency. This bothers the authorities: Consent to the processing of personal data, such as biometric data, must be given “freely, informed, unambiguously and in a specific and clear manner for specific purposes”, according to a statement from the authority (Portuguese). However, the fact that TFH offers financial compensation in the form of cryptocurrency could influence the decision to release biometric data and thus “impair the free expression of the individual's will”.

The authority has therefore imposed a preventive measure against World, which came into force on January 25. The project is not only controversial in Brazil: Data protectionists in Spain and in Portugal already took action last year.

The founders of TFH include Open AI boss Sam Altman and German computer scientist Alex Blania. The project was largely developed in Erlangen.

(wpl)