A key German privacy watchdog has ordered Sam Altman's World project to delete biometric data it collected by scanning people's eyeballs in order to prove they are human.
"The company will be obliged to provide a deletion procedure that complies with the provisions of the GDPR within one month of the decision taking effect," the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision said in a statement on Wednesday. World "will be obliged to provide explicit consent for certain processing steps in the future ... [and] the deletion of certain data records previously collected without a sufficient legal basis was ordered ex officio."
The Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision, or BayLDA, is tasked with enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, in the private sector. Wednesday's announcement concludes an investigation that began in April 2023, according to the statement. World, a crypto-based human verification project previously known as Worldcoin, has appealed the decision, the BayLDA also said.
Since its launch, World's entanglements with national regulators have been an ongoing issue as authorities took action to limit the project's collection and storage of biometric data. The project backed by Altman, widely known as OpenAI's CEO, argues it has taken measures during the last several months to assuage regulators' concerns, including moving to a system where World no longer stores biometric data.
"The results of BayLDA’s inquiry largely pertain to outdated operations and technologies that have been replaced in 2024," World said in a blog post. "In effort to go above and beyond the requirements of GDPR, iris codes used to verify a person’s World ID are no longer stored, and the previously collected iris codes were voluntarily deleted to ensure no personal data is retained to operate World ID."
World has had a mixed reception in Europe so far. While World launched in Austria in July, the previous month, Spain extended its ban on the project until the end of the year or until a GDPR audit is complete. Neighboring Portugal, in March, ordered the project to temporarily halt biometric data collection. The project recently launched in Brazil, a country with a population of over 200 million people.
The project aspires to provide digital identifications to as many people as possible. A core World value is the belief that society will be increasingly populated by agents powered by artificial intelligence and a system that discerns humans from automated actors is necessary. World uses small silver orbs to scan people's eyeballs and prove they are human. After scanning a person and assigning them a World ID, the project gives people cryptocurrency in the form of WLD tokens.
"What the BayLDA’s decision clearly illustrates ... is the urgent need to establish a clear and consistent definition of anonymization in the EU that will help protect personal data in the age of AI," World said Wednesday.
Seemingly as a result of regulators' scrutiny, in March, World rolled out “Personal Custody," a new initiative that meant people signing up for a World ID could no longer choose to have their biometric data stored and encrypted.
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