Comment by u1hcw9nx
5 days ago
The point of ZKP in EU wallet is that it separates checking age and privacy.
You can both give a proof your age and not lose privacy.
5 days ago
The point of ZKP in EU wallet is that it separates checking age and privacy.
You can both give a proof your age and not lose privacy.
Except that ZKP for sensitive data is far from being a thing, and also, I don't want the fucking government to have anything to do with what sites I access. Period.
Why the hell do I need to login to my digital wallet to access a fucking website???
What do you mean? Proving things about sensitive data without revealing it is what ZKPs are for. If you mean that the tech isn't mature enough to be trusted yet, I think there's some truth to that, but it depends on what software we're talking about specifically. Zcash has been in production for almost 10 years now.
The web is not a magical place detached from reality. Wanting absolutely zero goverment involvement (which does not mean spying btw) with it is frankly absurd.
The web has not had age gating via large-scale government coercion since its inception. To claim that it's absurd to think we can do without it is to detach from that reality, and is itself absurd.
The irony.
5 replies →
A significant risk with ZKPs is that they can make a lot of explicit control rules palatable by making the side effects much less extreme.
If a company can come up with a reasonable reason to check something, then a ZKP enables that check without wider harm to privacy. But it still gives the narrow harm to privacy that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
Put differently, privacy concerns have shielded us not just from surveillance, but also from powerful control. Control in the form of “you are only allowed X if you meet criteria Y”. With ZKPs, that shield of “why would I tell you enough information to determine Y” stops working. But those conditions on X are harmful more broadly.
Take the US border checks of Social Media. Are those more OK if all of a sudden there’s a ZKP you have to give of never having called Trump a cunt in any private message?