With ZKP age verification, services will not be able to track you without help from the CA. The CA will not be able to track you without help from the services. Both will contain the necessary information in their databases that when combined deanonymize you. The CA is the central authority/certificate authority.

So you should assume the government can track you, because you should assume both will be streaming those identifiers to it.

This isn't correct. With ZKP-based systems even the CA can't track you. That's the "zero-knowledge" part.

And those types of schemes will never see the light of day, read what they are actually proposing to implement.

but how is that possible? that even the CA cannot track you?

That's not really possible to explain in this space, unfortunately, but the overall idea is that there are mathematical techniques that allow you to prove that you have a valid certificate without revealing which one it is.

Yes, there is one party that can track you, which in some countries is still slightly trusted.

Ideally, no age verification would be required or proposed. However, if it is, this implementation should be the base minimum, should it not?

This is a gazillion percent better than a foreign corporation being in charge, isn't it?

I am a moron for writing this, ZKP is like magic like this. That is the entire point, and why I posted this.

Better than no age verification (and therefore, privacy) coupled with parents doing their job?

That would be ideal. However, this is tech proposal which takes so much of the slop out of the entire thing. With this implementation, there is no profit in it, unless your government is directly cooperating, aka a scandal in many countries.

I am a moron for writing this, ZKP is like magic like this.

I need to not HN after beers.