Comment by hunterpayne
2 days ago
Government systems leak information all the time. The type of institution managing the data makes little difference. Its how the institution manages the data that matters.
2 days ago
Government systems leak information all the time. The type of institution managing the data makes little difference. Its how the institution manages the data that matters.
But the government inherently has that data, as it comes from there. They're the ones issuing the IDs in the first place.
Theres no avoiding this, structurally. So the best thing you can do is not to introduce any additional points of failure.
All previous systems avoided this. The government issued me an ID in the past, yet had no record of when I used it, or for what.
I am so much more afraid of monopolies invading my privacy than roving hackers, or my corner store. Governments are the ultimate monopoly.
The government doesn't know what you use your ID for in a properly implemented ZKP system, either.
And clearly, the alternative is not the corner store. It's private monopolies building databases of 153M IDs.
I think the point is that if I have to use some system to tell the government "this is me", that's pretty much equivalent to the ID. It doesn't matter that they have the info already, it's that I now need to send them it in order to use the internet to like, file my taxes or send a message to my doctor or pay my electricity bill or any number of mundane things that aren't particularly worth the extra attack vector to try to protect against.
I think you're conflating a few things here.
With ZKP, you specifically don't have to do that. That's precisely what the Zero Knowledge in Zero Knowledge Proof means. Those are good for stuff like age checks.
But for the other stuff, of course you need to tell the government who you are??? How else are you gonna pay your taxes? Just send them some money anonymously and hope that settles it? Of course they need to know who's paying their taxes?
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