The same argument could be said for other age verification methods. Nothing stops a kid from getting their older cousin to verify their identity for something and it will never be possible to prevent this.

The people proposing these laws presumably think imperfect enforcement is better than no enforcement at all. In the non-zero-knowledge case, it's possible to revoke falsely shared credentials.

> In the non-zero-knowledge case, it's possible to revoke falsely shared credentials.

In a true zero-knowledge system sharing falsely shared credentials becomes easy because it’s untraceable. If the proof has no knowledge attached, you can’t conclude who used their credentials on a website that generates proof-of-age tokens on demand for visitors.

Yes, that's exactly why it can't work.

The one where the root user can enable parental controls requires the kid to know their parent's password or save up to buy their own device.

Oh no, a $20 Walmart phone, how will they ever afford it.

The older cousin case doesn’t scale. True ZKP could be fully automated to dispense verification tokens from a website to every visitor. If the proofs are truly zero knowledge there is no way to discover who is giving millions of kids their ID.

When we hear about “zero knowledge” ID checks in real proposals they’re not actually zero knowledge altogether. They have built in limits or authorities to prevent these obvious attacks, like requiring them to interact with government servers and then pinky promising that those government servers won’t log your requests.

That's why this whole thing is stupid. The smokescreen of "protect the children", and meanwhile a child will just use find another device. Maybe an older one.

Its billions of lobbying for state surveillance under a smokescreen you bypass with basic human interaction.