Worldcoin Ordered to Halt Operations in Hong Kong over Privacy Violations

Hong Kong authorities on Wednesday ordered OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s Worldcoin project to halt all operations in the region.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (PCPD) said in a media statement that the Worldcoin crypto project involved serious risks to personal data privacy.

In January 2024, the PCPD proactively launched an investigation into the Worldcoin project to ascertain whether Worldcoin's operations in Hong Kong violated the terms of the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (PDPO), Chapter 486 of the Hong Kong Laws. This resulted in the PCPD conducting ten covert visits to six locations involving the worldcoin project between December 2023 and January 2024. Thereafter, PCPD got court warrants to search and investigate the aforementioned six locations on January 31, 2024. 

PCPD investigations revealed that in order for participants in the Worldcoin cryptocurrency project to receive the tokens on a regular basis, they had to consent to the company collecting their face and iris images through iris scanning in order to verify their humanness and generate iris codes. Participants will obtain a registered identity, or World ID, which Worldcoin refers to as a digital passport. The statement confirmed that a total of 8,302 participants had their faces and iris scanned for verification during the company’s operation in Hong Kong.

Additionally, the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (the Privacy Commissioner), Ms. Ada CHUNG Lai-ling, stated that Worldcoin's operations in Hong Kong had violated the Data Protection Principles (DPPs) in Schedule 1 to the PDPO regarding the rights to collection, retention, transparency, access, and correction of data after taking into account the case's circumstances and the information obtained from the investigation.

“Worldcoin would keep user information for a maximum of ten years in order to train artificial intelligence models for the user verification procedure.” The PCPD believed that the length of the retention period amounted to the prolonged retention of personal data.

PCPD stated that the policies and practices regarding personal data are not sufficiently transparent as the Chinese language was not available for the privacy notice at the relevant time. This meant participants who did not speak Chinese as their first language would not be able to understand the relevant terms and conditions, policies, and practices of the Worldcoin project.

The Privacy Commissioner, Ms. Ada Chung Lai-ling, requested that the public notify the PCPD immediately if they discover that Worldcoin is still operating in the region using iris scanning devices.

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