France’s Data Watchdog Conducts Checks at Worldcoin Office in Paris
The French body overseeing the protection of personal data has carried out “checks”
at the Paris office of Worldcoin. The news of the French inspections comes amid heightened regulatory pressure on the cryptocurrency project co-founded by the current chief executive of
Chatgpt developer Openai.
CNIL is France’s independent watchdog tasked to ensure that the French data privacy law is applied to the collection, storage, and use of personal data.
In July, it said it was investigating Worldcoin for what it describe as the “questionable” legality
of its biometric data.
Worldcoin has been developed by a U.S.-German company called Tools for Humanity and founded in 2019 by Sam Altman, the CEO of Openai,
the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory behind the AI-based chatbot Chatgpt.
The project has stirred controversy as it requires users to have their iris scanned in exchange for a digital ‘World ID’ and, in some jurisdictions,
cryptocurrency as well.
On Thursday, a CNIL spokesperson said that the
“checks took place at the Worldcoin offices,” confirming an earlier report by Politico, according to
which the visit was made on Wednesday.
