Post #1528784

2026-04-16 23:23 UTC

First, I wanna say I appreciate your reply. It's well made. I believe you, mathematically, about how ZKP's work. I just think that when rubber meet road, there will be potholes. Example, strong encryption cannot be broken, practically speaking. The social media companies make real E2EE. But they control the client. So they simply scrape post decryption from the user's device. It's true, the E2EE was secure. But that didn't matter in the end. There was a way to circumvent. We'll see about ways like that with ZKP. I'm not smart enough to know how it may happen. Only that the incentives will be big. Encryption isn't defeated by breaking the math. Neither ZKP. It'll be some other way. Something sleazy. > the social media site will not discover anything about your identity beyond a binary “is above 18 years old” statement. > To discover anything else, they would BOTH have to collude in some significant way. I would say, social media can already discover most ppl's identity. Without having to collude at all. There's a whole ass industry of identity resolution, even when ppl don't mean to give their own identity. Would social medias stop doing that, just because now ZKPs? I'm afraid it may deliver a false feel of security.

Replies (1)

@yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-04-16 23:51

Can you explain a little what you mean with: >So they simply scrape post decryption from the user's device. As far as I know, no social media company's posts are E2EE. After all: It's not possible to have both public posts and E2EE. "Direct messages" to other users can be E2EE but you'd have to trust the company with the encryption keys. The only condition that requires Zero-Knowledge Protocols to function is that your device is not hijacked by hackers (and there are no deliberate backdoors and such). This can be achieved by having the app be open source with regular security audits. The social media company can do nothing to identify you, nor could the government (unless again, they collude and share secrets). But yeah, social media can already identify most users because of surveillance capitalism. The goal however is to ensure identification is not in any way made easier via age verification.

Open ##1528785