worldcoin
Could fingerprint scanning and facial recognition be used for onboarding?
I had a random thought – instead of using the special orb device for onboarding, could we consider using fingerprint and/or facial recognition for signups?
This idea came to mind as, in India, I can perform banking transactions with just fingerprint recognition. With billions of people already registered under the AADHAAR system, fingerprints seem sufficient to uniquely identify individuals.
Good question! We elaborate on why we need custom hardware here: https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/#why-custom-hardware-is-needed
We explain why fingerprints are not a viable approach here: https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/#biometrics
There is also an explanation here: skip to 31:42
Basically, fingerprints on your phone or face-id are sufficient for re-authentication (is this person different from one specific person). But it's not sufficient for global uniqueness (is this person different from billions of other people)
AADHAAR does solve the global uniqueness problem, from what I've heard. But it's not privacy preserving. It's also not trustless or decentralized, the Indian government regulates and controls it. It's also not open to anyone in the world - you need to be a resident of India to use it.
@TheButlah, thanks for your response! I'll review it thoroughly. For mass adoption, I was thinking if we could come up with an innovative solution that allows users to sign up on their own without needing custom hardware, we could achieve that more quickly. Of course, we'd still need to consider factors like privacy, uniqueness, and more.
Doing it without custom hardware would be great - but its a tough nut to crack, and probably impossible IMO. You need guarantees of secure computation as well as a high enough fidelity to scale to billions of people. If you do have an idea that you can prove out though, definitely reach out to the Worldcoin Foundation and see if they would give you a funding grant. I don't know if they are accepting applications rn, but with a sufficiently technical and promising proposal, who knows.