Sam Altman’s Other Startup Wants To Scan Your Eyeballs With Orbs
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, March 18th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. You know the frustration when someone leaves your text on read? Will they respond? Was it something you said? That kind of angst is spreading among teen users of popular social media apps Snapchat,

and new messaging features are the culprit. Then, basketball-sized orbs that scan your retinas could be the future of identity verification in the U.S., letting you do everything from buying bread to paying taxes. We'll weigh the pros and data protection cons of a new Sam Altman startup with our technology columnist.

First, new features on Snapchat have become a real source of stress for teenagers. So-called half-swiping lets people read messages without the sender's knowing. It's causing a lot of anxiety among teens who tend to use the social media app as a dating tool or to strike up a conversation with a crush.

Snapchat user Elle Limon says she's been half-swiped by boys more times than she can count, and that the practice is one of the most toxic parts of teen dating. It just really felt like almost dehumanizing to me, but he did not realize he was making me feel that way. And so when I was able to tell him, hey, like,

That was a really long time. You left me feeling really uncertain. He immediately apologized and was like, oh, my goodness, I'm so sorry. You know, I wanted to make sure that I responded to you correctly. So how are teens navigating this new minefield? WSJ columnist Julie Jargon spoke to the journal's personal tech editor, Shara Tibkin, about these controversial new features. So what exactly is half swiping?

Half swiping is the practice of partially opening a message on Snapchat so that you can read the message without the sender getting a read receipt. So what that does is it enables someone to take a little pause and decide when and how they want to respond without the other person knowing that they've read their message.

But for the person sending the message, it causes a lot of anxiety because when they suspect or find out for sure that they've been half-swiped and they haven't been responded to within a few seconds or minutes, they start getting really anxious about what

whether they said the wrong thing in their message, and, you know, when is this person going to reply? And it sets off a whole spiral of thoughts and anxiety. Why did Snap introduce this feature? So Snap said that they introduced this feature because teens feel pressured to respond to messages immediately. And that creates, in and of itself, a lot of anxiety for recipients of messages. They're on the app all the time, and they respond quickly, and sometimes they feel a lot of pressure about that.

So the whole point of this was to actually alleviate that pressure and give teens a pause to reflect on how they want to respond and to respond on their own time. Based on your reporting, it sounds like it isn't necessarily letting teens just pause. It's also causing a lot of anxiety.

It's kind of had the opposite effect for a lot of teens. It's ended up creating a whole other set of anxieties, particularly around the aspect of dating or teens talking in the early pre-dating stages of a relationship. You wrote that this seems to affect girls more than boys. Why is that? Yeah, I talked to some psychologists and experts who've studied gender differences, and they said that girls have been socialized from an early age to be caretakers and to be aware of other people's feelings.

And as a result, girls tend to ruminate more and be very vigilant to any signal that they might be ignored. And that this is something that just creates more worry and overthinking.

And certainly boys worry too about this when it happens to them. But there doesn't seem to be the overthinking to the same degree that girls are experiencing this. Is there any way to catch half swipers? Yes. So that's the other new twist here is Snapchat fairly recently introduced the ability to allow people to see when they've been half swiped. So people who pay $4 a month for the Snapchat Plus premium subscription service can

can actually see for sure that they're being half-swiped in the moment that they're being half-swiped. So what that means is you send someone a message and you stare at the app waiting to either get a response or to see if the person has read your message. And if the person is half-swiping you, these emoji eyes appear on your message so you can tell at the moment that it's happening that someone has half-swiped your message.

Snapchat said that they did this to sort of level the playing field and allow people to know when they've been half swiped. Did you talk to anyone who actually does half swipe people? Is it pretty common? Are all teens half swiping and then also being half swiped?

I talked to a teenage boy who said that he was half swiping girls all the time. And the reason, he said, was not because he was trying to play hard to get or keep these girls hanging. He just said he wanted to be careful and thoughtful about his responses before messaging someone back right away. Or sometimes he was just busy doing homework or doing sports, and he said he didn't realize that this was putting these girls through so much turmoil. That was WSJ family and tech columnist Julie Jargon speaking with personal tech editor Shara Tibkin.

Coming up, rather than checking a box online to verify you're a human being, would you rather use an orb that can scan your eyes? A Sam Altman startup hopes so. We'll dive into that after the break. I'm ready for my life to change. ABC Sunday's American Idol is all new. Give it your all. Good luck. Come out with a golden ticket. Let's hear it. This is a man's world.

I've never seen anything like it. And a new chapter begins. We're going to Hollywood! Carrie Underwood joins Lionel Richie, Luke Bryan, and Ryan Seacrest on American Idol. New Sundays, 8, 7 central on ABC and stream on Hulu.

OpenAI isn't the only startup Sam Altman is building. He's also working on an app called World that scans our irises for identification, verifies we're humans and not robots, and lets us shop, chat, order, and do bill paying all from a single place. Our tech columnist Christopher Mims joined Shara Tipkin to talk about World and its mysterious eye-scanning orbs.

So what is World? What is this company trying to do? They are trying to scan your iris with an orb, which is their actual term for it. And that creates a secure, anonymous piece of information which identifies you as a human being. And that can then be used by other apps, by other services to allow you to buy and sell things, etc.

to give you a little tick mark on social media or dating apps that identifies you as a real human being that would allow you to buy concert tickets by proving that you're not a bot that's trying to scalp them.

So they see this as the next evolution of, I don't know, think of it like when you use Apple or Google or Meta sign in to get into a website, except this will be totally universal and someday it'll be used even by governments. One thing you mentioned is that world is trying to be this sort of everything app. We've seen everything apps be popular in places like China, right?

What exactly is an everything app and why haven't we really seen something like that in the US? So in China, in particular, WeChat, but also in South Korea, in the form of KakaoTalk, there are these apps where inside of the app, you can do everything. You can shop, you can order the equivalent of an Uber, you can do your banking, and

And these have been really popular in Asia for a very long time. And they never really took hold in the West because we kind of didn't need them. We had the Apple App Store.

We had the Google Play Store. And so instead of a quote unquote everything app, you just download whatever apps you need. People like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and now Sam Altman have said, wouldn't it be great if we could create a everything app in the West? Because it's extremely lucrative to be the place where people conduct their entire online lives. World is offering a new mini app store within their World app store.

And they are saying, you know, that this might be a way to possibly succeed at creating an everything app for the West. What sort of services do you see inside that mini app store right now? There's, of course, payment apps, which allow you to transact with cryptocurrency, usually like stable coins. So not Bitcoin, but something where it's like a dollar is a dollar, but it's just a digital dollar. There are apps that will allow you to chat with other people and prove to them that you're a human being.

apps that allow for innovative things that their creators claim could only happen because of the world protocol. For example, there's a company based in Argentina that's doing microloans to people mostly in the developing world. And these are very small loans. They start out at like a dollar, five dollars, they go up to a hundred dollars. And the whole reason the system works, says the developer, is

is that they can uniquely identify people by their world ID, which of course is verified by that iris scan. And if somebody doesn't pay back one of these microloans, they're just banned from the service. So going back to orbs, what are these? What do they look like? Orbs are these things that look like big eyeballs, really. About the size of a basketball. They have a lens on the front and you have to stare deep into the orb.

And it scans your iris and then it takes that unique identifier and scrambles it in a way that they claim is unbreakable and cryptographically secure. And then they do all this crazy math and send it to the Internet. And the whole idea is this becomes your verified, unique ID.

that you are a human being. It's not actually an identifier. It's anonymous. That's the weird thing, but you could combine it with other identifiers to make it into an identity system. They call it a proof of human system. They have sent up

quote-unquote experience centers in places like Korea, Japan, South America. So you aren't actually buying an orb. You're just going to a place that has an orb and scanning your eyeballs. That's right. Although they do have a partner program. Like let's say you...

or just a shop owner somewhere and you want to get your hands on an orb and get people to come in and scan their eyeballs, you can do that. Worldwide, 11 million people have verified themselves by scanning their eyes in an orb. Are there risks to scanning things like our fingers and our eyeballs for authentication? How do we think about privacy and security? So biometrics have come a long way in the past, I don't know,

I don't know, 15 or 20 years, a couple of decades ago, it was valid to worry about using some pattern on your body, whether it's your fingerprint or your eye or your face or the veins in your hand as an identifier. But engineers have figured out pretty clever ways to scan parts of our body and then create this mathematical encrypted abstraction of that, that image or that data and

and then use that to securely identify us. We're already doing this on device, right? Every time you unlock your phone with your face, we're already taking a big step in that direction. So, you know, there are definitely systems that in the future will prove to be insecure. Like all systems, there's always a backdoor somewhere or another. But World, Amazon, with their hand scanning technology and others, they seem really serious about not losing people's trust by...

creating insecure systems. That was WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims speaking with personal tech editor Shara Tibkin. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producers Catherine Millsop and Matthew Walls. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.