Ex-Twitter Privacy Chief Joins Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Project

Tools for Humanity Corp., a tech company co-founded and chaired by OpenAI head Sam Altman that makes an iris-scanning orb as part of its Worldcoin cryptocurrency project, has recruited Damien Kieran to be its first chief privacy officer.

Kieran makes the move to the newly launched outfit as it finds itself at a nexus of regulatory scrutiny covering privacy, decentralized finance, and artificial intelligence. Tools for Humanity’s technology involves a metallic orb that scans the eyeballs of users to generate a unique digital identity called a World ID.

Damien Kieran

That “proof of personhood” is designed to help distinguish robots from humans, a potential necessity in the future to enable everything from financial transactions—such as trading crypto tokens—to establishing that someone is who they say they are.

Worldcoin wants to create the world’s largest network that will definitively prove who is a human in the digital realm, Kieran said. It will fall to Kieran and others—including Tools for Humanity’s chief legal officer Thomas Scott and the company’s outside counsel—to convince regulators, legislators, and users around the world that the platform is a trustworthy means for doing so.

“Privacy is an incredibly important thing, both from a technology perspective and the goal of the project,” said Kieran, who reports to Tools for Humanity co-founder and CEO Alex Blania. Kieran said an ethos of protecting privacy needs to be embedded in the company’s products so they gain trust with users who can access the Worldcoin project anonymously to verify their identities.

Executive Additions

Kieran is one of four new executives at San Francisco-based Tools for Humanity, which has also hired chief information security officer Adrian Ludwig, chief device officer Rich Heley, and head of World ID Ajay Patel, said the company’s spokeswoman Rebecca Hahn, a former communications chief at Twitter Inc.

Hahn said the goal of the Worldcoin project is not to know who its users are but to verify that they’re unique humans. While the company’s human verification technology, World ID, is available in the US, the Worldcoin token is not.

Kieran said Tools for Humanity’s engineering and operations teams have taken measures to obscure identifying information, which is often “the complete opposite from what you would do at other big tech companies.”

Some of Worldcoin’s efforts have created controversy, such as a data collection procedure that offered tokens to users in exchange for their iris scans. Bloomberg News reported earlier this year that Worldcoin was considering a partnership with OpenAI, the $86 billion generative AI startup led by Altman. Hahn said Tools for Humanity has no integrations or partnerships to announce.

Kieran said in the coming months he’ll be frequently traveling abroad for meetings with “external parties to get them to understand what we’re doing internally.” Tools for Humanity has retained Latham & Watkins partner Tim Wybitul in Germany, a leading data privacy lawyer, to advise on issues in the European Union, which has become a leader in the privacy space.

“We’re giving the same protections to every person, irrespective of where they live,” said Kieran, who before joining Twitter spent time in private practice at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Weil, Gotshal & Manges, as well as a stint in the law department at Alphabet Inc.’s Google. “We’re dealing with cutting edge, state of the art technology. If we can get regulators and the public to understand how it works that will be incredibly important in terms of trust.”

Twitter Exit

Kieran resigned in late 2022 from Twitter, where he was a deputy general counsel and the first privacy chief for the social networking service, amid a disagreement with Elon Musk over privacy compliance protocols at the company now called X following its sale that year.

Kieran still uses the platform, which at one point saw its $44 billion sale to Musk hinge on how many of its users were real humans versus robots. Kieran said he learned a lot in his seven years at Twitter, “including during the transition period.”

Kieran said his decision to depart Twitter, where he also served as that San Francisco-based company’s global data protection officer, was personal and that he wished nothing but the best for his former colleagues still there.

While Musk and Altman have recently sparred over AI, Kieran said his decision to join Tools for Humanity had nothing to do with either technology titan. “I don’t base my decisions on just the investors of a company, I think about what it’s trying to do and whether I can add value to a project,” Kieran said.

Kieran joined BeReal, a social media service sold for about $540 million last month to French mobile application and gaming publisher Voodoo, in early 2023 after leaving Twitter. Weil, where Kieran once worked, advised Voodoo on that deal, while BeReal was represented by Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.