When you go out to a physical store and attempt to buy alcohol or cigarettes, you’ll get asked to show some ID; online, when you want to visit adult sites, you don’t currently need to prove your age, but lawmakers in various countries are looking to change this. One technology that has been developed to address the age checks needed is Zero-Knowledge Proof, where you prove your age without having to reveal other data like birth date or ID.
To help companies develop their own Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technologies, Google has released its ZKP libraries as open-source, meaning they can be taken and used in other projects or adapted. This will make it easier for third-party developers to create privacy-enhancing age verification applications.
We heard a bit about ZKP from Google earlier this year when the company said that it was integrating the technology into Google Wallet to help disconnect your age from your identity. It also said at the time that it would be using it in other Google products and partner with apps like Bumble to help with verification. It also said at the time that it would open-source ZKP; that promise has now been fulfilled.
As libraries, Google’s newly open-sourced software can be integrated into a whole range of applications. As mentioned, Google is using it in Google Wallet, and it could also be used to verify the age of people visiting adult websites without needing to reveal their identity as part of the verification process.
Google has also said that the European Union’s eIDAS regulation encourages EU member states to integrate technologies like ZKP into the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet). The open-sourcing of ZKP could help with the acceleration of the development of these EUDI Wallets.
The open-sourcing of the ZKP libraries by Google will benefit various groups of people. We’ve mentioned that developers will benefit as they can use the libraries in a variety of apps. Businesses will also benefit by being able to meet privacy needs more easily.
Another group to benefit will be researchers who can use this “more efficient and performant ZKP implementation” to help create new applications and uses of technology. Finally, users will benefit from more private and secure digital ecosystems.
Now it remains to be seen how much adoption these ZKP libraries will get, given the growing need for such technology.
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