World unveils identity verification system

A Bay Area tech startup is getting a lot of attention – or more specifically looks – because of what it wants from its customers: a retina scan.

The company is called World, and it makes an identity verification system called the Orb. What it does is have people look into a machine to scan their eyes to prove that they're a human and not an AI bot.

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World was co-founded by Sam Altman, the CEO of San Francisco-based OpenAI, which has been one of the companies many blame for blurring the line between what's human made and what's robot generated.

"In this new era, we as human beings will need to know what is real and what is not, that we may actually have to prove our humanness," World Chief Business Officer Trevor Traina said.

But proving your humanity in this way comes with privacy concerns.

"It's true that we do need solutions increasingly to be able to distinguish humans from fake AI-generated creations on the internet, but as with everything else, whether this is the right solution depends a lot in part on whether you trust the company and the people behind it," said Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

At this early stage, World is a company we don't know much about. What we do know is that World says customer data will be encrypted, so the company won't keep it. Customers will be given a code to keep on the company's phone app for customers to use. The company said it has deals with Visa for a debit card and with some dating sites to make sure the person on the other side is actually a person and not a bot.