Comment by rocqua

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?