Worldcoin Forced to Delete Your Eyeballs! High Court Drops the Gavel 👀🔨

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Some people travel to Kenya for the wildlife, the Great Rift Valley, maybe the sort of transformative self-rediscovery that looks good on a dating profile. Sam Altman, on the other hand, apparently just wanted everyone’s eyeballs. (Technically, just their data, but let’s not get bogged down in the details.)

This week, Lady Justice Roselyne Aburili brought down the judicial hammer on Worldcoin—excuse me, the World Foundation, presumably rebranded after they realized the word “coin” isn’t as hip as “foundation,” or maybe because the former was already trademarked by a failed crypto project in New Jersey.

The verdict? Delete everything you scanned, licked, uploaded, or blinked twice toward a glowing orb. Yes, all the iris scans and facial mugshots Kenyans so gamely surrendered in exchange for the promise of “democratizing the future,” or, as it turned out, a spot in a dystopian database. Time to call in the country’s data protection officer—someone who probably thought the job would mostly involve changing passwords, not herding biometric data like digital cattle.

You’d think, as a global tech operation, they’d know you need something called a Data Protection Impact Assessment before playing peekaboo with people’s faces. But no, much like me with crosswalk rules in Rome, World just sort of winged it.

JUDGMENT: High Court safeguards the right to privacy

Today, Lady Justice Aburili Roselyne has allowed our Judicial Review Application, where we challenged the collection, processing, and transfer of iris and facial images (biometric data) using the World Coin App and the Orb…

— Katiba Institute (@katibainstitute) May 5, 2025

The Kabita Institute and the International Commission of Jurists, no strangers to the concept of privacy (I assume they lock their phones), brought the case. The ruling, in short: Even when the world is ending and everyone’s using AI chatbots to write wedding vows, you can’t just Hoover up people’s faces without asking nicely—or, in this case, legally.

Once lovingly referred to as a key market, Kenya was apparently World’s favorite data buffet until officials pulled the plug in August 2023. Still, undeterred, the World Foundation hinted in 2024 that their comeback tour was on schedule. Cue sound of legal brakes squealing.

As for World’s official reaction? So far, crickets—though, knowing tech founders, I expect a Medium post blaming “miscommunication” and “a profound respect for human dignity.” Meanwhile, World is busy launching its face-harvesting orbs in six U.S. cities. Los Angeles, get your moisturizer ready; your pores are about to go global.

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2025-05-06 14:57