You're making my point — Worldcoin's business isn't to collect biometric data, as alleged by many comments here.

Their business is whatever they’re doing, we can’t give organisations a free pass on bad behaviour because they aspire to be well behaved once they’ve extracted enough value from their bad behaviour.

Your comment implies that the article is wrong: it isn’t.

The article plays to the idea that "the company is using its cryptocurrency as a way to amass millions of biometrics", which is factually incorrect. The company is using biometrics made private via advanced cryptography, which aren't amassed or stored beyond the testing phase, as a means of distributing the token widely and uniquely to each person once.

The explanatory arrow for their business is backwards. It's totally factually incorrect.

Sure, you're right, it is factually incorrect to say that they're using a cryptocurrency to amass millions of biometrics, because they're actually using the _promise_ of a cryptocurrency to amass 500,000 biometrics. Very important difference!

You're putting so much weight in "...the testing phase..." as if that grants carte blanche to do whatever because the goal is (ostensibly) noble. The biometrics they're collecting and storing and processing belong to real people, whether they're in their "testing phase" or not is immaterial. The goal of this whole Orb-on-tour program is to collect biometrics, their primary activity is biometric collection.

They've pushed back their launch multiple times because they've acknowledged that their technology is susceptible to fraud and still needs work... so when does "the testing phase" end? When they've made their technology perfect? What if it takes 1 year, 5 years or even 10 years? What if they spend the next decade collecting millions of people's biometrics, is that okay because it's "the testing phase"?

They're going to poverty stricken countries and taking advantage of economically disadvantaged people (and then not even delivering on their meagre promises) and that's okay because it's not their explicit intent, it's just what they haaaave to do in the testing phase?

Let's play this out, let's assume (based on their inability to do it so far) that they fail to turn this experimental biometrics device into something that can uniquely identify people using a privacy-secure cryptographic process. Now let's take this quote from the Worldcoin CEO:

“We didn’t want to build hardware devices — we didn’t want to build a biometric device, even. It’s just the only solution we found,”

Doesn't take much to imagine them saying:

“We didn’t want to [store privacy-insecure biometric data] — we didn’t want to build a biometric device, even. It’s just the only solution we found,” he said.

Then what? Well they didn't want to store biometrics but they had to so it's okay?

They literally cannot even pay the people they sought out in poverty stricken countries the $25 that they promised, a task so trivial it can only be a wilful choice to fail to do it, so why on earth would we be charitable in how we assess the likelihood that they stick to their (as yet unproven) promise?

Worldcoin is a biometrics collection business until they do anything else.