Badge Co-Founder Dr. Charles Herder was interviewed and quoted for today's Businessweek Feature "Inside Worldcoin’s Orb Factory, Audacious and Absurd Defender of Humanity."

"Blania and Altman, who formally outlined their Worldcoin master plan a year ago, have since received feedback that might be generously described as mixed. On one hand, they’ve already persuaded more than 6 million people to go before an Orb and sign up for a World ID, and the sign-up rate has been surging this year. The total value of the digital currency (WLD) is more than $550 million. At a factory in Germany, Orbs are heading toward mass production and will soon be dispersed around the globe in a bid to push these numbers even higher.

"On the other hand, the whole scheme has struck many people as ridiculous and dystopian, a privacy nightmare straight from the pages of Orwell. Numerous countries have halted the iris-image-snapping operation out of fear that the people standing in front of the Orbs don’t really know what they’re signing up for and that the collection of biometric data is “unnecessary and excessive,” as a Hong Kong regulator put it in May...."

"Some critics look at all this and give Worldcoin a pat on the back for effort and intention while calling it a fundamentally flawed approach to security. “Worldcoin is doing something really important by bringing to the forefront the value of identity and biometrics,” says Charles Herder, a cybersecurity specialist and the co-founder of Badge Inc., an identity startup. But Worldcoin has produced vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit, which it later fixed, and according to Herder’s analysis of Worldcoin’s public documentation, the service has basic flaws in how it stores data. Plus, it’s still a company. “You have to trust that, 30 years from now, their business model does not change because they’re going bankrupt,” he says. “There are incentives to monetize that data, and you have to rely on the notion that those incentives don’t overcome their promise to you.”