During the course of an ongoing investigation into its business activities and data gathering procedures, Kenyan law enforcement officials conducted a search warrant at a warehouse in Nairobi that belonged to Worldcoin and seized some equipment.
Kenyan law enforcement agents entered a warehouse on Mombasa Road in Nairobi and seized several machines that they believed had data obtained by Worldcoin. The warehouse was located in Nairobi. According to a media outlet, the group drove this gear to the offices of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations so that it could be examined in further detail there.
This comes after the Kenyan government placed a halt on Worldcoin’s business operations and launched an investigation into the company. In exchange for 25 World tokens, the cryptocurrency company Worldcoin had been scanning the irises of Kenyan residents. However, after hearing concerns voiced by privacy experts that sensitive data obtained by scanning a person’s iris would fall into the wrong hands, the Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki decided to put a halt to the activities of the company. Additionally, as a result of this, the government began to scrutinise the corporation even more.
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The Worldcoin (WLD) token got its name from the Worldcoin project, which inspired its development. Iris scans will be used to authenticate the identities of users who use financial services as part of this initiative, which will focus on the development of an ecosystem for World ID. By utilising World ID, users of these services are guaranteed to be real people and not just some kind of automated programme.
The initiative to create Worldcoin was taken on by a group that goes by the name “Tools for Humanity.” Sam Altman, who is well known as the founder of Open AI, was a co-founder of this organisation. Notably, the initiative has been successful in luring investments from well-known venture capital firms, one of which being the cryptocurrency part of Andreessen Horowitz known as a16z.
Altman, the founder of Open AI, the company that produced the chat bot ChatGPT, says he believes the programme will assist in determining whether or not someone is a human or a robot. According to Worldcoin, the company decided to launch the platform in Kenya as the first African country because the country’s technology sector is already thriving and more than four million Kenyans are currently trading in cryptocurrencies.
According to the article, Immaculate Kassait, the Data Commissioner of the Data protection office, which had previously registered Worldcoin’s parent firm (Tools for Humanity) as a data processor, stated that Tools for Humanity neglected to disclose its genuine goals during registration. This information was provided by the Data protection office.
About Worldcoin
The San Francisco and Berlin offices of Tools for Humanity have collaborated on the development of a biometric cryptocurrency project called Worldcoin. It was established in 2019 by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, along with Max Novendstern and Alex Blania. Andreessen Horowitz is one of the company’s investors.
Worldcoin’s goal is to combat bots and phoney virtual identities made possible by artificial intelligence by developing a trustworthy method for authenticating humans online. This method will be referred to as World ID. Using a distribution system for its cryptocurrency that is comparable to that of UBI, Worldcoin tries to incentivise people to join its network by having them have their iris scanned using Worldcoin’s orb-shaped iris scanner. This is done so that Worldcoin can verify that the user is who they say they are.