Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman's iris-scanning Orb to verify users

In April, Reddit lawyers sent formal legal demands to the University of Zurich, whose researchers used AI to impersonate actual users in an experiment on the powers of AI persuasion. And states across the US are considering or passing new laws that require internet companies to verify the ages of their users.

As a result, there’s new urgency to find ways to verify some information about people online while also providing the privacy and anonymity that has become a cherished characteristic of the web.

Last month, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said AI and age verification laws would eventually force the company to check whether its users are human and of a certain age. Huffman said the company would work with third-party providers to avoid having to collect user information. “We will do our best to preserve both the humanness and anonymity of Reddit,” he wrote on the site.

When World ID users have their irises scanned by one of the company’s Orbs today, they still get free Worldcoins, which were worth just under a dollar a piece at the time this article was published.

But these days, it’s not the crypto component that makes Worldcoin a potentially important part of the AI industry. It’s the technology that can verify whether someone is a unique individual.

When Tools for Humanity was just getting started, it needed a way to prevent people from getting more than their share of Worldcoin. Otherwise, users could keep creating new accounts and receive an unlimited supply of the coin. But it also needed to do that without storing any personal information about users.

The system is sophisticated and complex, but somewhat easy to understand. The Orb scans a user’s iris, which is a one-of-a-kind biomarker like a fingerprint. It then creates an encrypted representation of the iris scan and breaks it up into fragments that are stored only on secret servers around the world, kind of like tearing up an impossible-to-decipher treasure map and hiding pieces of it in bank vaults around the globe.

In order to get hold of someone’s iris scan, a hacker would have to break into each of those servers, reconnect the fragmented data, and then reverse-engineer it back into the original iris scan. Even then, the hacker still wouldn’t know whose iris it was.

After the scan, users then get a unique World ID, which is stored in a locally encrypted vault on their smartphones.

World ID users can also verify their age and other credentials anonymously. If the Orb’s built-in age detection software suspects a user is under 18, it refuses to scan their irises.

It’s also possible to use the World app without using an Orb. But a World ID without Orb verification has limited functionality. It’s possible Reddit could accept logins with an unverified World ID, but would treat those accounts differently than fully verified ones. A pilot program allows users to verify credentials like passports with the World app by scanning it on the person’s local device, so no information is ever shared.