Over 200k Chileans have signed up for World ID

• Worldcoin (WLD) has announced that more than 200,000 people in Chile have signed up for World ID.
• The project, co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has come under increased scrutiny over data collection and privacy concerns.

Worldcoin (WLD) announced on September 24 that more than 200,000 Chileans have signed up and completed verification for its World ID. The number of sign-ups for the digital identity protocol exceeds 1% of the country’s population, which stands at around 19.5 million, the Worldcoin team noted.

Amid the growing demand in Chile, Tools for Humanity – a developer group contributing to the development and adoption of Worldcoin – has added the biometric imaging devices (Orbs) to two other locations in Chile. 

Other than the capital Santiago, the iris scanners are now located in the cities of Vina del Mar and Concepcion.

Worldcoin faces regulatory scrutiny

Worldcoin, co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and which went live in July this year, says more people are signing up with World ID as they receive “free” WLD coins. Indeed, according to details on the project’s website, over 2.3 million people have had their eyeballs scanned so far.

Altman and team maintain that the project is for a digital ID that will help people prove online that they are human – a path towards Proof-of-Personhood in a world where AI may make this difficult. Data regulators and privacy groups across several countries have, however, raised concerns about Worldcoin’s data collection.

It’s this push for more clarity on what happens to the biometric data that Worldcoin collects that has seen Argentina, France, Kenya, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and Germany take various regulatory steps.

Kenya, for instance, suspended Worldcoin’s activities in August and had a parliamentary inquiry after thousands of people thronged the capital Nairobi to have their eyes scanned in exchange for WLD tokens. Worldcoin co-founder Alex Blania is among the project’s officials to appear before the ad hoc committee.

According to a report in the Daily Nation last week, Kenya had detained the project’s top executives only to release them after US authorities allegedly intervened.