Key Takeaways
São Paulo sued World and AWS for exploiting weak populations to gather biometric knowledge for crypto.The lawsuit seeks to halt crypto funds and calls for $47 million to compensate 400,000 affected shoppers.Prosecutors allege World ignored a 2025 order to halt funds and hid AWS knowledge storage dangers from customers.
São Paulo Information Lawsuit Towards World and Amazon
São Paulo has taken motion towards Instruments for Humanity, the corporate behind World (previously often called Worldcoin), for its biometric assortment actions, and towards Amazon AWS for its function as World’s internet hosting supplier.
In a lawsuit filed on Monday by São Paulo’s Client Prosecutor’s Workplace, the workplace alleges that these two firms have been concerned in abusive practices associated to the gathering of biometric knowledge from shoppers in São Paulo, intentionally concentrating on folks with socioeconomic vulnerability, and providing monetary compensation for this knowledge.
The lawsuit, which estimates that over 400K folks participated in World’s Sao Paolo rollout, petitions for the preservation of all knowledge and metadata linked to the gathering of this info, and for suspending any fee or profit linked to biometric knowledge assortment till an evaluation is carried out.
The authorized motion seeks to label these actions as abusive and obtain a fee of 240 million reais (almost $47 million) in compensation for the shoppers’ particular person losses.
A report by the Iris Parliamentary Fee of Inquiry (CPI) discovered that a number of irregularities have been dedicated in the course of the motion of World in São Paulo, together with the deliberate focus of their provide in peripheral and high-traffic areas to draw folks going through socioeconomic points to ship their biometric knowledge for a crypto reward.
As well as, the general public prosecution claims that the corporate continued to ship these crypto rewards utilizing inner app transactions even after the Nationwide Knowledge Safety Authority (ANPD) ordered their termination in February 2025, and that buyers weren’t knowledgeable in regards to the financial objective of the challenge or the dangers relating to the processing and storage of their knowledge utilizing AWS servers.
On its web page, World explains that it “doesn’t accumulate, retailer or promote any private knowledge, together with iris knowledge, and verified World ID holders are nameless.”
World has already confronted comparable actions in Argentina, the place it was hit with a $200K tremendous for varied Nationwide Client Protection Regulation violations, together with permitting minors to enroll within the initiative as a consequence of lax ID checks and failing to reveal its biometric data-processing procedures.
