World Privacy FAQs

No. World does not and cannot know who you are. World is designed to only know if you are a unique human.

No.

At the center of World is World ID, an anonymous proof of human that securely proves you are a unique human online.

Name, email address, phone number, etc. are not required to use World ID.

Learn more about World ID.

You do. World has implemented Personal Custody, which means that the information (images, metadata and derived data) generated by the Orb during the proof of human verification process is held on your device and only on your device. Your information is never stored on the Orb, but rather sent to your device.

This approach gives you control over the flow of this data—not just deletion, but any future use prior to being deleted.

Learn more about Personal Custody.

No. Your information is sent from your device and never stored on the Orb. Further, World does not purchase, store, or sell biometric data.

Yes. Beginning with a data minima approach. The starting point for recognizing people’s control over their data is not asking for much data to begin with. This is why the Orb only takes photos of your face and eyes and sends them to your device, never storing them on the Orb itself.

The Orb features diverse, highly-advanced security features designed to ensure that the temporary computing is conducted securely and cannot be accessed by anyone unauthorized to do so. It’s equipped with a powerful computing unit to run several neural networks concurrently in real-time, which enables it to validate a person’s humanness and generate the proof of unique humanness locally on the device.

The security experts at Trail of Bits performed a specialized cybersecurity audit of the Orb’s software, which can be reviewed here, and, more recently, the team at Theori conducted an Orb security audit.

Learn more about World data security protections.

Learn more about the technical readout of the Orb’s data security protections.

Learn more about the Orb’s open source hardware and software. 

Learn more about World protocol security audit reports.

Yes. 

When a person uses their proof of human, or World ID, a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) prevents third parties from knowing the person’s public key or tracking the person across applications. ZKPs also protect the use of World ID from being tied to any personal data. 

World ID uses an open source protocol known as Semaphore that confirms the World ID data itself (public key and nullifier) verifications cannot be tracked to a person’s identity nor to someone’s World ID use in other applications.

No. 

Your World ID is a random number generated locally on your device before any humanness checks take place. The Orb is only used to verify your World ID. 

Here's what happens when you verify your World ID: The proof of human verification process involves the Orb—a high-tech camera—taking images of your eyes and face to confirm you're a real and unique human. This process occurs only once. The Orb processes these images on-device for approximately 10 seconds, checks you have never verified at an Orb before, encrypts the images, and sends them to your phone as a Personal Custody Package. The images are then permanently deleted from the Orb. 

World ID is explicitly not a set of iris images, and  it is designed to enable anonymous use only. Thanks to zero-knowledge proof technology, actions taken with World ID are not linked to a person's iris images, and third parties cannot link different actions taken with someone’s World ID through the World ID data.

Yes.

Iris images are securely stored on the mobile device of the World ID holder as a Personal Custody package – nowhere else. Most importantly, Tools For Humanity and World Foundation have fully deleted their database of iris codes and do not have access to the data on the World ID holder’s phone. 

Then, with the AMPC protocol, the unique humanness codeiris code is broken into fragments that are anonymized, encrypted, distributed and securely stored across multiple independent parties, including Nethermind, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and UC Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI).

Learn more about this breakthrough in privacy protection for iris codes.

Yes. In his in-depth look at proof of human, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin lists specialized hardware like the Orb as the most privacy preserving option currently available for proof of human solutions.

IMO they actually have been doing quite a good job of taking the privacy critiques seriously and designing their system to be more and more data-minimal. Modern cryptography is truly amazing.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 29, 2024

In addition, there have been multiple external audits of various parts of the tech stack, including by Theori, Trail of Bits, Nethermind and Least Authority.

Additional privacy resources can be found at the following links:

• https://world.org/privacy
• https://world.org/data-choice
• https://world.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive 
• https://world.org/privatebydesign-whitepaper

A more comprehensive understanding of all aspects of World Network can be found in the whitepaper.