Sam Altman's Creepy Eyeball-Scanning Company Gets in Bed With Zoom and Tinder [View all]

Source: Gizmodo

No one wants to talk to a bot, but how far are you willing to go to prove that you’re human? Sam Altman is banking on people being willing to surrender scans of their eyes in order to authenticate themselves, and he’s amassing some powerful sources to push more people to go along with the scheme. On Friday, both Tinder and Zoom announced partnerships with Altman’s World, the company behind the creepy, eyeball-scanning orb that is meant to prove users are human.

World has already been working with Tinder and ran a pilot of the verification process in Japan. It was apparently enough of a success that Tinder will roll out the authentication method globally. According to a press release, users will be required to undergo World’s verification method, which requires having their eyeballs scanned at a physical location with a proprietary device to prove they are human. Once they do so, they’ll get a badge on their profile to signal that they are a verified human. Tinder will also tempt people to partake by offering five free “boosts”—a feature that temporarily makes a person’s profile appear first for other users.

Zoom will also be getting in on the proof-of-humanhood plan, but will be taking a different approach. Per a press release, the video conferencing platform will start to integrate World ID Deep Face, a technology that cross-references an image of a user taken at the time they verify their identity at a World Orb device to ensure they are who they claim, performs a real-time face check of the person from their own device, and scans the live video frame that other participants see on screen. If all three methods produce a match, the person gets a “Verified Human” badge.

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It’s not clear World has anywhere near the infrastructure needed to support this scheme at scale at this point. Last year, the company claimed it planned to deploy 7,500 Orbs in the United States, but never followed up on that figure. The company reportedly has about 18 million verified users thus far, but many of them are people in developing nations who signed up because of the promise of Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency that has seemingly fallen out of World’s plans. The scheme to get users to trade their biometrics for digital coins was criticized for being exploitative and deceptive.

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Read more: https://gizmodo.com/sam-altmans-creepy-eyeball-scanning-company-gets-in-bed-with-zoom-and-tinder-2000748013