enabled = connected + empowered
As the year races on, WORLD has a few new faces on the team; Willie Bonnema has joined the development team and Chris Geerdts, Robin West, Michiel Heyns, Brandon Clay and Ronnie Garland have all agreed to spread WORLD around and extend our presence into Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe.
Ok Foods Eswatini is still displaying WORLD branding at their points of sale. In addition to actively using WORLD as their official Social Media platform, the management team has decided to move communications with staff from WhatsApp to WORLD.
Privacy is a hot topic among many people, and concern is rising about the amount of data corporations are gathering from their users (often in exchange for “free” services). Privacy is paramount to the WORLD team, and it drives many of the development and design decisions for the WORLD platform.
Let’s consider location as an example. While the WORLD app can operate without location permissions in Android, some of the value-added by the WORLD messaging capability is unlocked by knowing a Citizens’ location. For example, it allows a Citizen to filter by topics that are relevant to only their location, search for nearby users, or get local weather forecasts.
So how will WORLD responsibly work with Citizen’s location information? Currently Citizens have control over whether or not to share their location. In future Citizens will be able to adjust the resolution of the location information shared and limit it to region or country level.
Underlying this is lower-level protection of information through encryption of data in transit and at rest, particularly since the WORLD platform uses cloud components. We cannot rely solely on the protection offered by the cloud provider but need to add an additional layer of security under WORLD control.
Although Private conversations are not accessible by the general public, Citizens have the expectation that their information is protected from access by the WORLD platform itself (the evil admins), other parties outside of the WORLD platform, other WORLD Citizens and even other users of their device (since many users share devices). This is still a goal that we are working towards, and something that will receive more focus in the coming months as some of the identity aspects of the platform are refactored and enhanced.
WORLD believes in giving people choices and making life easier. We are updating our platform regularly so that we can provide what people in Africa need. While we are focused on improving our privacy and security, our next milestone will be the release of the WORLD wallet and simple secure payments.
Using USSD strings to transfer money can be complicated. Users need to know several codes and references and so people only use it for a limited number of transactions. The WORLD wallet is planned to launch in Eswatini in the second quarter of the year. This means that Citizens will be able to send money to a friend, pay their bills or even buy a movie ticket as easily and securely as sending a photo.
At the moment WORLD is only available on Android phones, but our aim is to leave no device behind. We are working on a number of projects to reach that goal. Keep in touch and see what comes next, and if you are interested in getting involved we would love to hear from you.
WORLD – always connected
