Weaponisation of Consent

The idea of attaching a bespoke cryptocurrency to World Coin is essentially to entice users to consent. In many cases, this is consent for something they do not necessarily understand

- SHOVANLAL CHAKRABORTY

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act has set the cat among the pigeons in India. The Act has time and again received strong opposition on the grounds of violating the right to privacy, creating an opaque, toothless Data Protection Board, and concentrating overweening powers in the hands of the executive through the dubious amendment to the Right to Information Act, among other concerns on transparency. Yuval Noah Harari's latest book 'Nexus' has kicked a new row over the issue all over the world including India.

The Internet Freedom Foundation and the National Commission on People's Right to Information have been at the forefront of analysing these concerns in great depth. Alas, in the case of data and safeguarding the right to privacy, that is not how things work. The biggest example of how misleading consent can be comes, interestingly, in the form of Open AI CEO Sam Altman's offering of the World Coin. World Coin aims to create a "globally inclusive identity and financial network, owned by the majority of humanity," according to a white paper describing the project. In other words, it is a digital identifier for each person on the planet, which they are terming a World ID, tied to a cryptocurrency called WLD. This is the purported solution to authenticating human beings in an age of rapidly evolving AI bots, while also addressing the contingency of a universal basic income in a global economy disrupted by AI. That is, roughly, what they seek to provide through creating a "proof of person hood".