ChatGPT Selfie Craze Ignites Biometric Privacy Firestorm in Kenya

Nairobi's streets are buzzing with a new digital obsession—and it's raising alarm bells for privacy watchdogs.

The AI Selfie Surge

Kenyans are flooding ChatGPT with personal photos, chasing hyper-realistic AI avatars. The trend cuts through demographics—from students in Mombasa to entrepreneurs in Nairobi's tech hubs. They're feeding the algorithm a goldmine of biometric data: facial contours, iris patterns, unique skin textures.

Regulatory Blind Spots

Local data protection laws scramble to keep pace. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner faces a modern dilemma—how to govern data that's already left the continent, processed on foreign servers with opaque retention policies. Existing frameworks might as well be trying to catch smoke with bare hands.

The Data Gold Rush

Every uploaded selfie becomes training fuel. While users get a slick digital twin, AI models get richer—learning subtle ethnic markers, regional expressions, environmental contexts unique to East Africa. It's the ultimate raw data play, and Kenyans are providing the capital free of charge. (Wall Street bankers would kill for customer acquisition costs this low.)

Biometric Backlash Brewing

Digital rights groups sound the alarm. Once biometrics escape the barn, there's no rounding them back up. Unlike passwords, you can't reset your face. The concern isn't just today's harmless avatar—it's tomorrow's unauthorized identity verification, deepfake proliferation, or surveillance profiling.

Tech's Privacy Paradox

The trend exposes our collective bargain: convenience traded for permanence. Kenya becomes a case study in real-time—a nation leapfrogging into AI adoption while its privacy infrastructure plays catch-up. The selfie might be digital, but the risks are profoundly human.

Kenyans freely give their biometrics to Altman’s bot

This trend follows Kenya’s battle to delete its data from Worldcoin. Worldcoin is a crypto-backed digital identity project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. It is designed to verify that users are real humans by scanning their irises with specialised hardware in exchange for a digital ID and crypto tokens.

Worldcoin’s operations in Kenya began in 2023 with the deployment of its signature “orb” devices, spherical scanners that captured iris and facial scans from participants. In exchange, users were offered 25 free Worldcoin tokens (Ksh 8,256 at the time) at the time. This incentive drew large crowds but also deep concern from privacy advocates and regulators.

Kenya’s regulatory pushback was swift. In August 2023, the government suspended the project amid fears the data could be misused or transferred outside the country without sufficient safeguards. 

In  May last year, the High Court ruled that the company behind Worldcoin violated the Data Protection Act of 2019 by collecting sensitive personal data without proper consent and without conducting a mandatory Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA).

Last month, Cryptopolitan reported that the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) confirmed that all iris scans and other biometric identifiers gathered during Worldcoin’s 2023 enrolment exercise had been erased from the project’s systems.

However, with the new AI caricatures is obtaining the very data that was deleted. During the process of creating it, ChatGPT requests a clear selfie, good lighting, a visible face, and no heavy filters.

“I need your actual face […] once I have it, I can exaggerate the right features, sharpen the attitude, and dial the realism just right,” the bot states.

To Ms Kassait, the AI caricatures trend is part of a phenomenon called surveillance capitalism. According to Harvard, it is a new FORM of capitalism that converts human behaviour into data for tracking, analysis, and monetisation. 

“What you have just done is share your biometrics. In the future, somebody doing analytics can actually tell every single thing about you. You clicked, you didn’t ask what the purpose is,” she added. To that end, she encouraged users to carefully read the platform’s terms before sharing. 

OpenAI expands Ad model as financial pressures mount

The caricature trend emerges as AI companies face financial pressures. OpenAI recently introduced advertising in ChatGPT responses and launched a cheaper $8 monthly Go tier to increase revenue. 

OpenAI has approximately $13 billion in revenue and around $1.4 trillion in compute commitments. The AI company announced a string of partnerships in recent months. Among them, Nvidia said it would commit $100 billion to support OpenAI as it builds and deploys at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems.

More recently, OpenAI announced a $10 billion deal with chipmaker Cerebras to deploy 750 megawatts of Cerebras’ AI chips. It also has other agreements with AMD and Broadcom.

Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI are publicly clashing over their business strategies, especially the role of advertising in AI products. Anthropic paid for high-profile Super Bowl ads mocking OpenAI’s MOVE to start showing ads in ChatGPT, using the tagline “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

Anthropic has committed $50 billion to building data centers in the US, but it will also spend money buying computers from players like Microsoft and Google. According to Anthropic, unlike OpenAI, it’s doing more with less.

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