Worldcoin Hires Former Google, X and Apple Execs to Beef Up Privacy, Security

Tools for Humanity (TFH), builder of decentralized identity project Worldcoin, has hired four seasoned experts to beef up areas like privacy, security and identity management.

Damien Kieran joins as chief privacy officer, having held the same position at X (formerly Twitter), and general counsel at BeReal.

Adrian Ludwig, who served as director of Android security at Google and chief information officer at Atlassian, a developer of collaboration software, becomes chief information security officer. Ajay Patel, who led the Google Payments identity team, becomes head of World ID.

Rich Heley, who previously held vice president and executive roles at Apple, Meta and Tesla, becomes chief device officer, overseeing Worldcoin’s retina-scanning orb, the means of collecting human identity data.

Worldcoin’s unique approach to biometric data harvesting may be divisive, but there’s no doubt a gathering AI and machine learning revolution has increased the need for proof of humanness and tackling online fakery, particularly as half the world’s population votes in elections this year.

In recent years, Worldcoin has been probed by data protection regulators in countries such as France, and earlier this year the project’s iris scanning and identification operations were said to contravene Hong Kong’s data protection principles, according to the region’s Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (PCPD)

Kieran said his new CPO role is to ensure the company complies with the regulations and frameworks around privacy and ensuring external audiences, in particular privacy regulators, understand and have transparency into the tools behind Worldcoin.

“I look forward to continuing to engage with regulators and data privacy officers in the EU and around the world to answer their questions, and share information transparently and debunk common misperceptions as we continue to serve individuals by giving them greater access to financial and identity networks,” Kieran said in a statement.