Tinder is partnering with Sam Altman’s World project to let its users prove they’re real humans, in just about the creepiest way possible: scanning their eyeballs with a Cyclops-looking orb.
The initiative, carried out by Altman’s startup Tools for Humanity, was announced last Friday, and represents a major foray for the biometric verification startup, which has struggled to catch on amid numerous controversies.
The concept’s invasiveness notwithstanding, it does address a persistent problem. Dating apps like Tinder are rife with scammers, creeps, and bot accounts — so why not fork over your irises to a company with alleged data privacy violations and stand out among the hordes of suspicious profiles?
There will soon be “more stuff made by AI than is made by humans” online, Altman warned at the event, the BBC reported. “I’m not afraid for the future as long as we can tell between the two.”
Tinder is providing incentives to try out the verification scheme. After scanning their eyeballs and receiving a “World ID,” users will receive five “boosts,” which raises the visibility of their profile in an area for thirty minutes at time. These normally aren’t free, and cost up to $10 a pop.
World originally began as Worldcoin, a project that used the same Orb to scan people’s eyeballs in exchange for receiving a World ID and some cryptocurrency. The crypto it was peddling, however, was its own token, WLD. In effect, it was coaxing people into surrendering their biometric data in exchange for company scrip; today, a WLD token’s value is worth only 25 cents, while it launched at $7.50.
Moreover, an investigation by MIT Technology Review found that Worldcoin used predatory and deceptive practices to get people to submit to its scans, often targeting exploited workers in poor countries. Governments have struck back. In the EU, it was ordered to delete all iris scanning data taken from people living there. The Kenyan government suspended Worldcoin’s operations in 2023, and the UK’s data regulator said it would investigate its practices.
Given all the baggage it comes with, Tinder is really going out on a limb in partnering with Altman’s biometric startup, and World seemingly needs Tinder far more than Tinder needs World. So far, World boasts that 18 million people have obtained World IDs through eyeball scans and it will hope to raise those figures by tapping into Tinder’s giant pool of around 50 million actively weekly users.
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