South Korean PIPC Fines Worldcoin 1.1 Billion Korean Won for Illegal Iris Data Collection and Transfer
TapTechNews September 26th news, the Personal Information Protection Commission of South Korea (PIPC) on Thursday imposed a fine of 1.1 billion Korean won (TapTechNews note: currently about 5.799 million Chinese yuan) on the cryptocurrency project Worldcoin (World Coin) because it illegally collected the iris information of about 30,000 users in South Korea and transferred it overseas.
Worldcoin is a cryptocurrency project based on iris biometric technology and was co-founded by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. In February this year, after receiving complaints about the iris information collection of this project, PIPC launched an investigation and decided to punish Worldcoin at the plenary meeting on Thursday.
Worldcoin was launched last July and pays users WLD Tokens in exchange for users scanning their irises with its spherical iris scanner. Once it is confirmed to be a human, the user will be assigned a WorldID for creating an online wallet to store their Tokens. As of September, the iris information of 29,991 users in South Korea has been used for Worldcoin certification.
The investigation by PIPC found that the Worldcoin Foundation and ToolsforHumanity (TFH) - the technology developer of this business - failed to provide users with necessary information such as the purpose of data collection, information storage and usage period when collecting users' iris data.
In addition, these two entities were also found to have failed to notify users when transferring users' personal data overseas (including Germany).
PIPC imposed fines of 725 million Korean won and 379 million Korean won on the Worldcoin Foundation and TFH respectively on Thursday due to its violation of laws regarding the processing of sensitive personal data and its transmission overseas. The foundation was also recommended to establish an agreement to obtain users' consent for collecting sensitive data and avoid using personal information for undeclared purposes.
PIPC officials said that the commission confirmed that all the original iris information collected by Worldcoin has been deleted.