World Halts German Iris Scans as Regulatory Heat Intensifies
World (or World Network), formerly Worldcoin, the ambitious and controversial digital identity project co-founded by Sam Altman, has quietly suspended its iris-scanning operations across Germany, plunging the venture deeper into its long-running battle with European data protection regulators.
In Brief
- A Pattern of Global Resistance: The German halt is the latest in a series of major setbacks for the project, which has already faced bans or suspensions in Spain, Portugal, Kenya, and Hong Kong over similar privacy concerns.
- German Operations Halted: World, the crypto identity project from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, has paused all iris-scanning Orb operations in Germany amid an intense, multi-year battle with the country’s data protection authorities.
- Legal Battle at the Core: The move comes as World appeals a German regulator’s order to delete all collected iris codes for violating privacy laws, setting the stage for a landmark legal fight over the future of biometric data in Europe.
The company’s website, which as recently as April showed dozens of active “Orb” scanning stations, now simply tells German users that the “Orbs will return soon.” A company spokesperson told DL News that the pause is part of an overhaul of the silver, basketball-sized scanning devices and that it plans to launch a flagship store in Munich. No relaunch date was given.
The move comes against the backdrop of a fierce legal challenge from German privacy watchdogs, who have deemed the project’s data collection practices illegal under Europe’s strict GDPR rules. This suspension marks a critical inflection point for a project that aims to distinguish humans from AI but has consistently clashed with the human right to privacy.
Regulators, Red Flags, and the Fight Over Iris Data
The heart of the conflict lies with the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision (BayLDA), the lead EU regulator for World due to its German subsidiary.
After a two-year investigation that began in 2022, the agency dropped a bombshell in December 2024: a 132-page enforcement order declaring World had violated data privacy rules and demanding it delete all iris codes collected from users.
The agency found that World had stored plain-text iris codes in a database for nearly a year, a practice that presented “significant data protection risks.”
World, which says it has since deleted the codes in question, is now fighting the order in a Bavarian court. The company has pivoted its technology to a “secure multiparty computation” system, where encrypted pieces of iris data are stored across different servers, including at UC Berkeley and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
BayLDA President Michael Will recently described the new system as being “like in a Harrison Ford story, as long as no one has all the puzzle pieces of this former picture, you do not have personal information.” He confirmed the agency will bring in scientists to evaluate if this new method truly guarantees anonymization.
As World Scans Spread, So Do Government Bans
Germany’s regulatory hard line is not an isolated incident. While World has successfully signed up over 7 million people worldwide, its global rollout has been punctuated by prohibitions and suspensions.
Spain and Portugal halted operations in 2024 over concerns that minors were being scanned. Kenya suspended the project citing data mishandling, and Hong Kong issued an enforcement notice for excessive data collection.
These actions showed a widespread concern among global regulators that collecting immutable biometric data like an iris scan is an unnecessary and disproportionate risk to privacy. The project’s grand vision, as articulated by Altman, is to provide a defense against a future flooded by advanced AI, creating a reliable method of proving one’s “personhood” online.
Yet the reality on the ground has often been messy. Reports from Berlin last year detailed organized schemes where vulnerable groups, including refugees, were paid cash to scan their eyes, effectively trading their biometric data for the project’s WLD crypto tokens.
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