The cost of keeping the internet human

I walked up to a sleek orb, a camera embedded in its surface, and stared into it for a few seconds as it scanned my iris, all to prove I was human. Although it sounds like a scene from a sci-fi film, this is reality with World ID.

As AI grows capable of replicating a human likeness with unnerving accuracy, proving that you are human online is becoming more critical than ever. Tools for Humanity, a company founded in 2019 by Alex Blania and Sam Altman, is offering a unique solution to prove humanity through its World protocol that scans people's irises. 

This summer, the company celebrated three years since launching World, and has since accumulated 18 million users who are verified with World ID's iris-scanning orbs and hold a Proof of Human marker. Once verified, users can take advantage of exclusive access to human-only opportunities, such as reserved event tickets, a human badge on dating apps, and even the ability to prove during a video conference that they are who they say they are. 

The human verification process is straightforward. Interested users can visit one of over 100 physical orb locations worldwide, spread across cities such as London, Munich, San Francisco and Tokyo, and simply have a photo taken of their iris and face, for the system to confirm that they are a unique, flesh-and-blood human. In my experience, it took no longer than a minute. Once the process was over, I quite literally said, "That's it?"

Of course, the technology behind it is anything but simple. 

Behind the scenes, advanced cryptographic techniques are at play from the moment the photo is taken until the user is verified, ensuring the system can accurately distinguish humans from bots and, most importantly, that the user's biometric data remains secure, even partnering with reputable universities to do so, the company told me at the "World Lift Off" event in April, where I got to prove my humanity. 

It was learning that information that prompted  me to spend the last couple of months digging into more about the company, its cryptographic techniques, and its mission, all to ultimately answer the question: Can people actually trust the process? 

The eyes: the window to the soul

One of the most intimate things people can share is eye contact. It's so deeply ingrained in our culture that we have common sayings like "the eyes are the window to the soul," or iconic movie lines such as "the eyes, Chico, they never lie." 

Yet, here comes a tech company asking people to feel comfortable not just looking into that window, but reaching through it. Naturally, many people are apprehensive. The company says it anticipated this reaction.

"You're used to offering your hand to someone you just met; yet, your eyes are somehow the most private part of your body, it has a lot of advantages, because it's very hard to get someone's resemblance without them actively participating, unlike fingerprints, which I can just get from that bottle [that you touched] if I wanted to," said Remco Bloemen, head of Blockchain at World Foundation. "But, it does make the whole process a lot more intimate."

So why risk alienating potential users when far more palatable biometric markers exist? The answer lies in entropy, or random differentiation: the more unpredictable the information, the more unique it will be, making it more effective at differentiating one person from another. 

"We wanted to build something that could actually scale to a billion people. This was a hard requirement for us that forced us into the direction of iris codes," said Bloemen. "Irises have this really cool, complex pattern, which is about as complex as a QR code, and it's not genetic. It's entirely random. It's early in embryonic development that it crystallizes by itself, fully random, into these beautiful patterns, which contain a lot of entropy." 

World cites research claiming that a scan of a human eye can have over 200 bits of entropy. Although fingerprints have been a common method for identifying people, they are not as unique as they may seem, Bloemen told The Deep View. Backing that claim, World also cites research that found that a fingerprint has approximately the same entropy as an 8.3-character password, far from unique enough to distinguish eight billion individual humans. 

Biometric entropy numbers can be misleading, however, according to Joshua Copeland, director of cybersecurity at Crescendo AI and professor at Tulane University. Because the data comes from human bodies rather than a random generator, he said, traits tend to overlap, scanner quality skews the results, and a template’s bit length overstates its real strength. Still, he said, iris codes are stronger identifiers than the alternatives. 

"Entropy is significant because it quantifies the distinguishing information present in a biometric representation. For example, an iris pattern typically contains more discriminative information than a single fingerprint," Copeland said. "A thumbprint may suffice for local device verification, whereas an iris code can offer stronger differentiation at a population scale"

Faces pose similar challenges, with genetically related people having similar faces, or even the same one, in the case of twins.

Ultimately, it is in the user's interest for the means of verification to be as airtight as possible, as it gives World's verification system credibility: if a person is verified, this assures that they are a human who was only verified once, as opposed to a bot or a human operating swarms of accounts. 

Iris codes may be better identifiers than the alternatives, but that raises a harder question: why should anyone trust World with theirs? Bloemen’s answer lies in what he calls "cryptographic magic."

Behind the magic 

Getting started is simple: download the free World ID app from Apple or Android, then visit an in-person Orb to have your iris scanned, a process far less intimidating than it sounds. All you have to do is let it photograph your face and eyes. 

The Orb is essentially "a fancy camera," Tiago Sada, CPO at Tools for Humanity, told me. An onboard Nvidia chip lets it verify on the device itself that a real person is standing in front of it. The photos are then encrypted and sent straight to your phone, where they’re stored, so nothing stays on the Orb itself.

Because users hold their own photos, Sada explained, they’re protected, both from leaks if the company is ever breached, and from the company itself deciding to monetize their data.

"The fact that only you have those photos is a first and really big thing, and already very different than how CLEAR would work at the airport, or how a normal social network would work. In all those cases, [user] information is stored on a server, in a database," Sada added. 

CLEAR, a biometric identity service, lets members bypass the airport ID check by verifying who they are with facial biometrics. Unlike World, CLEAR stores biometric data itself. Its privacy policy lists faceprints, fingerprints and iris scans among the information it may collect, along with contact details and government-issued ID. The company says it does not sell biometric data, but it can share personal data with TSA, partners and service providers, and when legally required.

World takes a different, more complex approach. The Orb converts the photo into an iris code, a unique string of numbers that the company says can’t be traced back to the original image. Using a process called anonymized multi-party computation, or AMPC, that code is split into pieces stored at separate institutions around the world, or node operators, including the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, UC Berkeley’s Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

"Very importantly, those pieces never come back together, and even if they did, the only thing you could do is see the hash, which doesn't tell you anything about a person, as it's some random number that cannot be reversed to the photo of the Orb," explained Sada. 

To contextualize it further, Sada likened the process to mixing paint. Splash different colors onto a white page and blend them, and you end up with one unique color that can’t be pulled apart again. Cut that into tiny puzzle pieces, scatter them globally, and "anyone that has one of those little pieces, they have no idea," Sada added.

In addition to keeping the system going, the node operators are meant to keep World honest. "Our role is to bring independent, rigorous scrutiny to these frameworks, to aid in ensuring that infrastructure like World ID is built responsibly, securely, and transparently before it scales broadly," a UC Berkeley spokesperson told The Deep View. 

The system compares the AMPC fragments derived from your unique humanness code against the existing AMPC fragments, which are stored on decentralized, independent nodes, to make sure you are unique and haven’t registered more than once, running complex mathematical calculations across a set of independent nodes, like Berkeley, without revealing anything more than a confirmation as to whether or not that user has been scanned before. 

Once verified, users never have to share their iris data again. Instead, when logging into an app, their phone generates a zero-knowledge proof showing they hold one of the verified World IDs, without revealing which one.

"A zero-knowledge proof, or ZKP, allows one party to prove that a statement is true without revealing the secret information used to prove it," Copeland explained. "The prover generates a cryptographic proof, and the verifier checks that proof rather than independently processing or viewing the underlying private data." 

While both ZKP and AMCP "are among the most promising privacy-enhancing technologies available," Copeland warns that neither should be treated as "cryptographic magic," as ultimately, the real-world success depends on other factors such as how the surrounding system is operated. 

What can you do with your World ID?

The process of being assigned your World ID is frankly anticlimactic compared to how sci-fi the outcome feels. Once a user has signed up, users will already have the World ID App downloaded on their devices, as it's needed to start the verification process. Once verified, there is a middle tab that looks similar to a driver's license logo where you can view your World ID, which displays the word "Human." Tap it and it says "verified unique human" and the date you were verified.

If you need to show a third party "proof" of your humanity, you can click on the "proof of ownership" tab and get an encoded proof, or a complex string of letters and numbers that you can copy and paste over. Some integrations are easy to link to right from the app. 

For instance, with Tinder, if you link your World account, you get a badge that proves that you are a real human instead of a bot, as well as additional perks, such as five free boosts. World Music allows verified humans to purchase from a select pool of tickets, attempting to circumvent ticket scalping.

World ID Deep Face for Zoom lets you prove you’re not a deepfake in a virtual meeting, and ask others on the call to prove the same. 

That, however, raises an additional question: if World only verifies that you’re human, not who you are, how can it tell that the face on screen belongs to the person who was verified? The answer lies in the photos on your phone. After joining a meeting, participants take a selfie, which is compared against the images the Orb captured at sign-up. If they match, a "Human Badge" appears on their tile in Zoom.

Brendan Ittelson, Zoom’s chief ecosystem officer, said integrating with World ID was a "natural fit," as Zoom looks for ways to raise trust in collaboration and give customers options to establish it. He noted that AI is making impersonation easier to scale, increasing the need for solutions that address evolving trust and security risks.

"It's exciting to see where the technology has evolved and how easy and user-friendly they've made it to do a strong biometric check in a user-friendly way. In terms of my experience and others that I've talked to, they're actually surprised how quick that enrollment occurs," said Ittelson. 

Additionally, World has developed a number of Proofs, or second-layer products, which companies could choose to build on and integrate into their own platforms. 

• World has developed "Proof of Age," which works by letting users tap an NFC-enabled ID document to their phone, then generate a proof that they’re over 18 or 21 without revealing the document’s underlying personal information. The data stays on the user’s device. 

• In October, World also added Proof of Attributes, which confirms specific information from an official government credential, such as nationality or being over a certain age, using a government ID, as well as Proof of Presence, which provides a quick liveness check on a phone to prove that a person is present.

• Several of these, including Proof of Presence, Proof of Attributes and Proof of Human, are being marketed by World for banking and financial services use cases, a sector that is particularly vulnerable to deepfake fraud. 

The possibilities for the integrations that could be built on top of the World protocol are nearly endless. For instance, Bloemen explained that, theoretically, it would be possible for this to be used in airport security. 

"The US government or another foreign nation would be issuing this identity, and if we build the right integrations, we can use this in our app," said Bloemen. "So now you don't need to share your entire passport document when you check into a hotel; for example, you can just give a zero-knowledge proof that you are who it says on the bill."

The World ecosystem in itself is massive. Beyond World, which is the proof of human protocol discussed in this article, Tools for Humanity also operates the World Money app, which is described as a "financial super app" that brings together stablecoins, payments, investing and earning, and more. To make matters more complex, Worldcoin (WLD) is the "native token" or cryptocurrency of the real human network, a digital asset that can be used in experiences determined by the community, such as participating in Mini Apps, platforms, protocols, services and more that are built on World, as described by the company.  

However, to verify your personhood or use the World Protocol, you do not need to be involved in Worldcoin or the World Money app. While these are part of the World Network, they are an optional part of the experience, similar to how a user can have a Google account and then separately choose whether they want to use services such as Gemini, Google Wallet or Google Docs. 

The World protocol offers a way for people to avoid being duped by AI, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem: tools that make realistic fake content cheap and easy to produce. Among the companies building those tools is OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, who also co-founded Tools for Humanity.

That doesn’t make World’s solution any less worth exploring, but it raises a bigger question: how much responsibility do AI companies bear for slowing the fraud their products enable? Scams long predate AI, but it's undeniable that the tech has exacerbated the issue. Deloitte predicted in 2024 that generative AI could push US fraud losses to $40 billion by 2027, up from an estimated $12.3 billion in 2023.

We’re already living in a world where you have to prove you’re human, and that burden will only grow. The harder pill to swallow is that the same industry creating the problem is also selling the fix.

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