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U.S. companies back Sam Altman's World ID even as much of the world pushes back

https://restofworld.org/2026/sam-altman-worldcoin-zoom-tinder-partnerships/
100•kelnos•2h ago

Comments

rdevilla•1h ago
As if I needed another reason to despise this continent. Who actually wants to uphold, work for, and build these systems in our society? This is seriously the kind of nation you want to inhabit?
jacquesm•32m ago
Half of HN. At least.
frogperson•1h ago
This is fascism. It erodes our right to privacy and should be shouted down at every opportunity.
2ndorderthought•1h ago
World id, meta verifier, how many other military funded establishments are pushing to require mass surveillance of everyone doing anything. Meanwhile their bots run rampant all over the Internet without any concern for anyone else's infrastructure, copyright, or ip. The irony...
red-iron-pine•41m ago
so take down the internet. or take down their company. or just stop using the internet

will posting this on forums that are run by these same people actually be able to drive change?

jochem9•20m ago
Yes.

Your message needs to find other people. The how is irrelevant, it just shapes and transmits it.

pocksuppet•23m ago
You'd be silly not to, if you think about it. There's demand for ID verification, and don't you want to be the one with copies of everyone's documents, instead of the other guy?
ArcHound•1h ago
You mean to tell me that companies that got rich by hoarding data are excited to hoard more data? Never would have guessed.

Also, why wouldn't anyone want to have data about everyone? Seems like a valuable asset.

2ndorderthought•1h ago
Defense contractors can sell it to the military and related agencies for top dollar. That's probably number 1, number 2 is higher fidelity correlations to other data.
josefritzishere•1h ago
Nobody wants to live in an open air prison.
jmclnx•1h ago
Of course they do, when the age verification morphs into real personal identification (PI) all people's habits will be known to everyone.

Time to put a stop to this PI tracking trend. But we all know PI will be tracked by all entities in the future in about 10 - 20 years.

theplatman•1h ago
so we're trusting the guy who created tech to make it easier for bots to exist on the internet to then sell us the solution to fix the problem he made worse?
wmf•52m ago
I guess it would be worse if he was doing nothing to address the problem.
estimator7292•36m ago
Incorrect. Completely and utterly.

Trying to make money on selling the solution to the problem you caused (while also probably tracking literally everyone with the solution) is much worse than causing the problem and doing nothing about it.

Teever•41m ago
I saw someone in another thread put it quite succinctly:

Shit in the pool then sell the nets to clean it up.

HSO•29m ago
he didnt create anything
stefan_•13m ago
Ironically, of the only thing he did create (ostensibly), a copycat never went anywhere "social network", its claim to fame was the app (preinstalled by paying carriers) spamming your entire contact book with SMS invitations to join their failing network. Splendid privacy record!
llbbdd•14m ago
I've seen this take a lot and I don't really understand it. IMO if there's anybody to blame here, and I don't think there is, you could go back and assign blame to the authors of the Attention is All You Need paper, or Google as its publisher.

Once that was out in the wild it was only a matter of time before someone productized it, but there was no conceivable world in which nobody decided to, and there was no guarantee that it was going to be public in all cases. The basis for LLMs is so simple in hindsight that it's not even impossible that it'd been independently discovered and privately weaponized for many years before 2017.

AlexandrB•1h ago
I can't believe this idiotic project is running so long after the "blockchain for everything" mania ended. Seems like they can't believe it either since they changed their name from "Worldcoin" to just "World.
simonw•36m ago
I'd love to see some credible reporting on the graveyard of blockchain projects.

So many obviously stupid ideas cropped up on the blockchain in 2021-2022. How many of those are still going concerns?

I guess the problem with blockchain stuff is that often there's no servers to shut down or other clear indication that a project has failed - presumably you can look at on-chain data to see if people have stopped trading various backing tokens, but does trade ever clearly stop or are there always bots exchanging tokens back and forth?

traderj0e•14m ago
Transactions on a blockchain have a cost, so it's kinda hard to sustain faking usage.
jonathanstrange•1h ago
The US is trying hard to become world's most despised country.
red-iron-pine•38m ago
Oh please.

China already has this level of tracking, Russia is straight up clamping down on the entire domestic internet, and Europe is headed their aggressively, too.

Perhaps glorious Paraguay, aka Best Guay, will shine as the last beacon of freedom, but this is plainly a global phenomenon

CamperBob2•20m ago
The difference is, nobody ever expected anything better from countries like China and Russia.
traderj0e•11m ago
Yeah, they also expected the US to keep providing research grants that no other country will pay for. I don't care what other countries think. This Altman project is a problem though.
goolz•1h ago
The blind leading the blind. These companies and Sam are both devoid of any sort of ethical code aside from C.R.E.A.M.
red-iron-pine•40m ago
protect ya neck is also one of their main ethical concerns
giancarlostoro•1h ago
Sam Altman doing his hardest to become more hated than Larry Ellison I see.
red-iron-pine•43m ago
do not anthropomorphize sam altman
noir_lord•38m ago
No one who has watched him talk would. (And yes I know the origin of the reference but at least Ellison doesn’t pretend).
amlib•32m ago
do not anthropomorphize the Sam Mower...
booleandilemma•58m ago
I think we need less technology. Can we have a de-tech movement? Life-saving tech is fine but enough is enough with software, AI, surveillance, etc. It's too much. It's been too much for the past twenty years or so.
xantronix•46m ago
Won't you think of the children! And the economy! My shareholder value! MY DIVIDENDS!!!
booleandilemma•9m ago
[delayed]
gibsonsmog•45m ago
The Butlerian Jihad looms
pesus•20m ago
It's already becoming a trend amongst the youngsters, though I can't say how widespread it is. I think it's inevitable and long overdue.
traderj0e•16m ago
Well yeah this will help with that movement. And if the remaining online presence like Tinder involves biometric checks, that's maybe not a bad thing, but I also have no faith in this particular attempt at it. The alternative is the bot problem which will also push people off tech.
greenchair•57m ago
his mark of the beast attempt # ?
gentleman11•53m ago
Weirdly, peter thiel is going on tour right now promoting the idea that the antichrist is coming and may be an organization or social movement rather than a person. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I only skimmed the articles about it
jacquesm•38m ago
'And how do you know this is the case?' : 'Receipts, mostly.'.
notahacker•6m ago
yeah, always struck me as odd that Thiel is more obsessed with identifying candidate antichrists than almost anyone else on the planet, including some people who are actually observant Christians, and yet it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that the most messianic secular figures who treat themselves as above mere laws and the guys making millenarian prophesies about the scale of what they're going to deliver are basically the guys in his rolodex...
Terr_•56m ago
I'm not even remotely-interested unless there is legislation that creates civil-liability and criminal penalties for abuse or mishandling of the data.

Also, companies shouldn't be able to refuse service just because the prospective customer's biometric data was leaked/stolen/duplicated in the past. I mean, when you think about it that's some Twilight Zone or Black Mirror territory.

thesurlydev•49m ago
Since when has that stopped companies from mishandling of data? :)
drob518•56m ago
Oh, hell no!
gentleman11•54m ago
I suspect that if we don't want to live in this future, we need some major open source tech leadership around making something like an anonymous version of this

I know, not exactly an easy problem to solve, but big tech or government is going to do it if we can't find better solutions first

wmf•50m ago
Google and Apple already developed private age verification.
john_strinlai•52m ago
>On April 16, it published a blueprint for how companies can grow their revenue with its digital ID.

that "blueprint", hilariously enough, starts with the title "How AI is eroding the foundations of the internet".

from a sam altman company. im afraid if i rolled my eyes any harder that they would spin out of their sockets.

jacquesm•34m ago
To fix the internet, we had to destroy it first.

There is no way these guys don't know exactly what they are doing. It's the spam thing all over again, but on a 100x worse scale. Cue PG with an essay 'A plan for AI'. Except this time it is probably going to be game over.

I can see a real future for the likes of tailscale here: botfree networks of friends.

taeric•41m ago
This is an odd topic. On the one hand, we do seem to have a problem where attention is hijacked by engagement farming. On the other, we also know of problems from draconian management.

I would actually like it if we had something that could say, only promote things on my feeds that are "liked" by people within a geographic radius of me. At the least, mute things that are getting pumped from hostile regions.

I just don't know that I see how this can get us there, though? Seems far more likely that it would lead to more abuse.

watwut•20m ago
Or like, have chronological feed of accounts user follows. Simple. Produces less outrage tho, so it is a no go.
taeric•10m ago
This assumes that most people would choose that feed? Which, I'm less convinced.

That is, this sounds like the idea that telling people if bad things happen when you eat too much candy, then people will eat less candy. Just flat not the case at large.

Yes, you also have to document the downsides of candy. Such that I'm also all for having that feed. But I don't see it being enough to move the needle much, on its own.

int32_64•38m ago
Is there any technical solution to these centralized ID authorities doing sybil attacks and minting identities out of nothing to manufacture consensus on supposedly "human verified" sites?
zingababba•38m ago
Sama can ID my balls.
derriz•28m ago
I’d guess that the pattern of ball wrinkles are quite unique. It could have applications for secure login - you’d could hold your balls above your phone camera or lay them onto a USB attached mini-scanner for authentication.
izzydata•37m ago
Perhaps it is time to return to meatspace for verifiably real interactions.
red-iron-pine•35m ago
bring back PGP in-person signing parties
siva7•34m ago
I would be happy if Tinder used this tech. The Internet is unusable nowadays because of bots.
yardie•30m ago
The Blockchain is back, baby!

/s

simonw•29m ago
I tried to track down the original source of the news that World ID is being adopted by Zoom and Tinder and DocuSign and it looks like it's an event they hosted on April 17th. Here's their blog post about it: https://world.org/blog/announcements/the-new-world-id-and-th...

There were more logos on that title slide: Tinder, DocuSign, Zoom, Okta, Vercel, Shopify, Browsnerbase, AWS, exa, RAZER, Coinbase, VanEck

bradleysz•21m ago
The axiom here is that both AI and the human internet are worth keeping.

Tech like World ID is scary. Agreed.

What is the better alternative? AI isn't going away and a human internet is worth preserving.

kaonwarb•20m ago
Pairs well with also-on-the-front-page https://app.oravys.com/blog/mercor-breach-2026
cantalopes•12m ago
Necer hace i tgought i can have a job in age of jobless ai by being a human verified data scraper
iknowstuff•12m ago
Judging solely by their FAQ, this is not enough. Iris photos can be fabricated client-side, including by AI, and can be shared.

So it's invasive AND worthless? Why is this getting support?

You need an offline/IRL verification step and measures to prevent sharing/cloning. AND you need to never phone home revealing services you're using.

Total garbage

    Proof of human verification powered by the Orb only involves one type of data: images of your eyes and face. It does not require your name, email, gender or anything else.
    
    The iris images are used to verify unique humanness, while the images of your face are used for Face Auth, a security feature that ensures only the person who verified their World ID at an Orb can use it.

    The Orb takes high-resolution images of your irises and face.
    The Orb uses these images to confirm your humanness and converts the iris image into a unique code which is then split into randomized multi-party compute (MPC) fragments.
    The Orb sends the images and MPC fragments to your device (your personal custody package), before permanently deleting them.
Your device sends the fragments to the AMPC service to confirm you have never verified before. Your World ID is verified.
traderj0e•10m ago
"So it's invasive AND worthless? Why is this getting support?" Probably cause it's just a data grab, same as how Facebook weaponized 2FA.

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https://restofworld.org/2026/sam-altman-worldcoin-zoom-tinder-partnerships/
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