Comment by AnthonyMouse
5 hours ago
> My government has already seen my government-issued ID.
If you have a government ID and all you use it for is voting and paying taxes, then they know that you vote and you pay taxes.
If you have to use it for accessing the internet then they know everything you do on the internet. What you read, who you talk to, what you post, when you sleep, where you are at any given time -- it's very much not the same thing as just having a picture of you and your name.
No they do not. A properly designed government app that uses cryptography to generate a deniable token that can't be cross-correlated but proves your humanity/age to a consuming site is manifestly different than Google adtech hoovering up as much of your activity as possible.
> A properly designed government app
Oof, that's not a great premise to take as a requirement right out of the gate. More counterexamples than examples for that one.
> that uses cryptography to generate a deniable token that can't be cross-correlated but proves your humanity/age
If it's actually deniable/anonymous then how would it work for rate limiting? If you can't correlate their activity then you don't know if the million requests are a million people or one bot with a million connections. If you can correlate their activity then it's not anonymous.
Moreover, it's a false dichotomy that we should be doing either of these things. The better alternative to corporate surveillance isn't government IDs, it's no surveillance.
A site can still choose to have a login system if it wants to. Sites can still rate limit based on IP address or cookies or whatever they use today.
The idea would be to use ZK proofs to demonstrate that "yes, this anonymous request is from a client acting on behalf of an adult human EU citizen" - that's something that is not easy to do today.
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I have not seen any government adopt such a standard.
some EU countries claim to provide anonymous age verification services, but those only hide your identity from the relying party. the site you visited is logged to the government's database along with your identity, before you're redirected to the target site with an "anonymous" token.
> the site you visited is logged to the government's database along with your identity
Is that true, or are you spreading FUD? Because the system in question is not even live yet, it's only had experimental releases.
They could do it like that, but they won't do it like that, because tracking the population is a feature not a bug