Kenyans who lined up to scan their eyes for Worldcoin, a blockchain company founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, can finally breathe a sigh of relief. The government says that the data is gone. Deleted. Wiped. Zilch.
Here’s what happened: Kenya’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC), the regulatory body overseeing its data protection act, confirmed that Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, has permanently deleted all biometric data it collected from Kenyans.
What was it doing with this data in the first place? In 2023, Worldcoin started offering tokens worth about $54 or KES 7,000 for the iris scans of Kenyans. Queues formed on WordCoin’s stand, and the government didn’t love what it saw. Questions around informed consent and data storage quickly turned into a government suspension, seizures of equipment by the police, and eventually a court ruling declaring the entire exercise unlawful.
In May 2025, after a long and uncomfortable national conversation about consent, privacy, and how much your iris is really worth, the High Court ordered that the data collected be deleted. Now, the chapter is officially closed, at least on the data side.
A possible return? Worldcoin says it wants back into Kenya, but with better safeguards. Will Kenyans trust it again? That’s hard to say, but other digital ID and fintech players are watching closely. It’s okay to innovate, but don’t experiment recklessly.
