I remember the world coin project as they was an airdrop in my country for which a user has to scan his/her iris. People went crazy thinking the same about this coin and participated in the airdrop. I still remember main stream media were using this event to gain views. They were not that biased about it but they did talked about the issues.
Every human living has a unique iris and that can't be copied. Using the human iris they are trying to create a unique identity for verification. The problem that I also understood was if they sell this databse to a country that wants to control the world and its ecosystem. This is not a project that I think should be associated with as they are compromising a user's privacy.
They say they just keep the verification and other datas such as iris profile, name and phone number etc. are not stored. But still countries dont get convinced. Maybe they keep some datas. Most of the countries like argentina and spain just stopped the operations without researching. Uk has started an investigation i wonder their results. Waiting for it.