I know many people don't like Worldcoin and it is respectful. Companies have been using sensitive information many times before and most of the time breaking consumer's rights. But my honest opinion is that banning the project and the way they have done, it is ridiculous and only shows how administrations are losing the control battle day after day. Yesterday all media was publishing how the Spanish authorities have temporarily (for three months initially) banned the service. The company had to stop scanning users' iris to create a private key and stop their wallet services, so anyone living in Spain may not be able to use the App while the ban is active. I registered in November while I was attending DevConnect in Istanbul but may not be able to use the app if trying to access it from Spain. This means no verification use and not receiving their regular biweekly airdrop. You can read about it on this Reuters wire.
Let me start by giving a link to those who do not know what proof of humanity is and how Worldcoin is approaching the way to solve it with biometrics. You can read this post from Vitalik Buterin about it. He is not in favor of it, but he explains very clearly what is the problem, how other companies have approached it before Worldcoin, and what can go right and wrong.
If you follow any of the media articles you can read that Worlcoin has been sending information to the Spanish data protection regulator AEPD for quite a while, explaining their tech and receiving no response from them a very common way to act from Spanish agencies. After a warning a few months ago the company was notified it has to cease their operations or will be fined.
Worlcoin operates in the EU under a company based in Germany. They have been following the EU regulations since it was established there and although it has been investigated by several countries, none of them have decided to ban it yet. The Spaniards forgot about EU regulations, as they did many other times, and decided to move forward and ban the service.
You may be in favor or against the service, but it is being implemented by more and more third-party services as a way to prove humanity. Companies such as Discord, Reddit, Telegram, or Shopify have started using it as a verification process, which means you may be banned from using those companies if they end up only using this method as verification. This may be the first consequence. I have been using Worldcoin to verify I am human on a Superchain testnet fauced to get tokens for dApp testing. Users will not be able to do so from now on. You can check the difference amount you get verifying using Worldcon or Github.
My iris is owned by the authorities of most of the countries I have been traveling to in the past years, as customs control has implemented this way of verification. When they do, they have my passport so they completely link my biometric data to my data. Worlcoin does not ask you for any personal info at all when scanning so no one can link your account to your iris, they delete the photo once your private key is created. I trust way more a private company than any of the authorities in the countries I have visited, plus, I should be free to decide, I can decide if I scan my iris with Worldcoin but cannot decide if I want to do so when crossing the border of a foreign country.
Killing consumer rights with the excuse they are abusing sensitive information is way more abusive than what the company is doing. Luckily you can use a VPN and keep connecting to the dApp, using it to verify yourself with any service that requires you to do so and potentially claiming your coins every other week, I still have to verify this as I have not gone through a new drop yet. Again, an easy way to bypass the authorities which are only killing many people to get extra income from the UBI distribution Worldcoin gives regularly.
