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I may be misunderstanding the issue you're pointing out here... but I note that while the paper/sentence talks about "authorization" you're talking about centralized "authentication."

As an authorization system Zanzibar focuses on: can agent A (identified through some means) perform action X on object Y. It isn't about deciding whether an arbitrary actor is agent A but proscribing what actions agent A can perform against the universe of all possible objects (which likewise are referenced abstractly and not stored within the system itself).

The knowledge that A could do X on Y is information that might be disclosed (and thus entails some privacy risk)... but inherently doesn't reveal: anything about the identity of A; whether A has ever done X; or what Y's contents are or what it represents.

On the other hand, perhaps you mean that because membership in sets of users is also stored within it (via a sort of "is member of" permission) you can use that to de-anonymize who a given actor is. This might work but it assumes you can uniquely derive which agent from a set of abstract agents represents that individual and that you extrinsically something about the person being the only person in this specific set of sets.



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