One place I wish there was zero knowledge proofs involved, or even any kind of cryptography, is when you perform credit assessment for loans outside your bank: an external loan provide peeks at your full bank account history to assess whether you’re eligible. They don’t need to know where I buy my socks, or even how much money I have. Only that I have a big enough deposit and a steady enough cashflow.
Where you spend can have an impact on a decision… e.g. you may have the income and savings but if you’re regularly spending on gambling that can be a red flag.
This isnt a cryptographic problem really. The loan checker is already trusting your bank to give them the correct information, it's only a matter of anonymization (e.g., they could return merchant types instead of merchant names etc.,.) but theres no real incentive for this.
this is the example often cited as usecase for zkTLS protocols, which are protocols that use additional trust assumptions to notarize a connection you have with a TLS protected host, and then you can prove the notarization (i.e. a signature over the TLS transcript) in ZK as well as any parsing over request/response data.
