Comment by anon-3988
5 days ago
Age is just one metric. I don't want zero proof tech about information X. I don't want to have an identity. Full stop.
5 days ago
Age is just one metric. I don't want zero proof tech about information X. I don't want to have an identity. Full stop.
This can be used to have zero-proof knowledge of "over 18" or "not over 18". So they don't really get your age, except that you are in two broad ranges.
If you get enough signals like that you can often narrow down a very large cohort of people to an individual.
First it's 'over 18?', then it's 'over 25?', and then 'biological sex?', 'employed?', 'enjoys posting on HN?', 'active in the early morning?' and after half a dozen questions, all with binary answers that are safe individually, you can zero in on a 23 year old woman who has a job and posts on HN in the morning.
Ask a few dozen questions like that and you'd be able to sieve an individual from a group of millions, especially if they're unlucky enough not to be absolutely typical.
Proper ZK proofs don’t work that way. N different proofs will not be linked to each other unless the circuits are written to emit a stable identifier.
Obviously if you see a bunch of proofs for known circuits coming from the same IP address then yeah, you can infer a bunch of info from that metadata.
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Browser fingerprinting can already pinpoint you exactly. We should focus on that.
I think anon's point is that it could be used for other attributes in the future, like your nationality or... your social credit score (don't worry, it only proves that your score is over or under 500).
The point perhaps is that these things enable discrimination based on extremely gross grained and defective criteria - in some ways the least relevant parts of your identity.
You only need about 33 bits of information to uniquely identify every human.
Ideally, but in practice only if the bits are uncorrelated and each divides the population in half.
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the visited site won't have the info. but someone in the chain will definitely know your identity. the government, private contractors.
Do you want others to have an identity? Say policemen, someone who borrowed something, the postman, people asking for donations, your doctor etc?
And does it make sense that at least some people do want your identity before interacting with you?