The Commissioner for Personal Data Protection of Hong Kong (PCPD) has announced the initiation of an investigation into Worldcoin for alleged violations of rules related to the storage of biometric information.
A representative of the regulatory body visited several working areas of Sam Altman's project, where retina scanning is being conducted.
PCPD pointed out that the data collection and processing by the startup may violate Hong Kong laws. The agency has initiated the investigation to protect society's privacy.
The regulator advises citizens to carefully examine several key aspects before providing their biometric data, including the legality of the process, the purposes and extent of data collection, as well as the identification of organizations with access to the data.
In addition, PCPD recommends keeping in mind the retention periods of biometric data and security measures.
Following the announcement of the investigation, the WLD token's price dropped from $2.67 to $2.25, a 15% decrease according to CoinGecko.
15-minute chart of WLD/USDT on Binance Exchange
The project's main product is the World ID protocol, based on zero-knowledge proofs technology. This tool allows people to undergo identification using biometric data or a phone number.
Earlier, Worldcoin disabled biometric verification using orbs for users in India, Brazil, and France.
In December of the previous year, Worldcoin introduced World ID 2.0, which was integrated with several platforms, including Telegram, Reddit, Shopify, and Minecraft, to provide passwordless authentication.
The project, launched, has attracted interest from authorities in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Kenya, and Argentina.
