Zero-Knowledge Proofs Aren’t Age Verification Silver Bullets

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "Most age verification laws tend to fail at their primary goal of barring kids from being online or from entering only specially designated zones, not to mention they pose a significant threat to everyone’s privacy...

ZKP-focused AV schemes are gameable, hackable, and not the cure-all some may claim... pose an existential threat to everyone’s digital rights, not just kids... The issuer of the tokens:

• could track every time that credential is used, creating a dangerous trail of metadata ...
• could be pressured by authoritarian governments to remove a user's access to a service, essentially removing that person’s access to the internet entirely.

Without oversight ... centralizes critical internet infrastructure in the hands of very few actors."

It then explains the basics of how they work, from the basic idea to ""zk-SNARK" ... the current preferred method for age verification" where "the ZKP is verified instantly" without a lengthy cryptographic to-and-fro.

And then explains why the EU's approach is broken: "age verification within a "mini-wallet" app ... inside the EUDI (European Digital Identity) Wallet... is being met with plenty of warranted criticism from digital rights experts... [and] a security researcher found they could bypass the app's system using a quickly built Chrome extension".

The basic problem is that any "centralized identity verification system creates a single point of failure that is extremely vulnerable to both cyberattack and authoritarian overreach."