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It doesn't seem very sensible to me. The specs say that a ZKP proof "should" be used.
Basically, you get a token from some source that knows your age and identity, such as the government. You pass this token on to some other entity that wants to know if you are above a certain age.
If both of these parties record the tokens they send and receive, then your browsing history can be tied to your identity. Realistically, this would only happen if the government wants it.
Using ZKP, you could prove that you have a valid token, without disclosing the details. But if the government decides that the tokens have to be recorded, then sites simply would not accept the ZKP.
I think one could also make a more subtle and limited attack by issuing special tokens. Say, someone's accused of being a terrorist, or violating copyright. Then they could be issued a special token which instructs receivers to record their activity and forward it to the police.
Yeah as far as i am aware, there is no such thing as zero-knowledge proof in practice for this kind of thing. If there are "bad actors" in other words "the police" with access to both the government database and (through a warrant or backdoor) the websites data, then the whole anonymization is gone. Its a sandcastle concept and an attempt to trick the population by making it sound fancy when its not at all.
ZKP has a specific meaning in cryptography. In fairness, it does a little here. But yes, it is basically a marketing term. Like "blockchain" or whatever.
Eventually, the idea here is to divide the population into 2 classes, one of which is to be denied access to certain information or services. If privacy is the only potential problem one sees with that, then... well...
Well yeah the inherent absurdity of age verification itself is a whole separate topic, but i think that battle is already kind of lost sadly. Our societies are so overobsessed with safety, there is no way they will not fall for the whole protect the children shtick.
From what I can tell from the ZKP spec and the research paper linked there, it seems like it should work correctly. In other words, even if the government and the website collaborate, it can't actually determine it's you. That requires that it's implemented right and that it's always used though, which is not the case since it's an "experimental feature."
Hm, I'm reading the spec. It seems more simplistic than I was expecting.
Guess it does just pass the attestation around.
The attestation is ideally only used once and issued in batches, so this is both good and bad I guess, since if they ask to track you and they haven't already recorded all the attestations, they'll need to wait for you to generate more.
Basically a big TBD. Lovely.
The more subtle attack you mention could probably be avoided if the root certs and so on or whatever equivalent they're using are public and you check that the attestation given to you doesn't include extraneous details (which ideally the app would do for you). Not sure how that'll interact with the zkSNARK solution provided as an "experimental feature."
It doesn't really matter though since they can just record the attestations when they're issued, so they just have to say "look for these attestations" to whatever site and they can track your visits.
Of course, using it in batches is only "recommended," so I guess they could just issue it once and continuously reuse it, in which case it would be very easy for websites to link it to you.
There's probably more I could pull out, but yeah, doesn't seem great based on the spec :|
EDIT: based on my reading of the ZKP spec linked in the main spec, it seems like it should work correctly, but as long as it's an "experimental feature" and not always used it's not really useful. They mention that in cases where the ZKP setup can't be used it should be able to fallback to the token setup. Ideally it really shouldn't do that, especially if it doesn't specifically tell you that it can't continue without using ZKPs and thus potentially leaking your identity.
After I first skimmed the specs, I had thought it would require constant check-ins with the attestation provider. Apparently, you need to get the attestation installed only once. I have trouble seeing how that could work out.
So a kid gets a phone from some cool older brother or an unaware grandpa. What stops them using that single phone to verify everyone in school?
Of course, the kids might not bother when you can just use a VPN or some non-compliant, foreign service.