https://webkit.org/blog/16993/news-from-wwdc25-web-technolog...

It’s an ISO standard and it is being rolled out as we speak

This part

  other iOS applications that have registered themselves as an Identity Document Provider.

What I’d like to see is for the site’s request to contain their access rules. Must be over 18, must be in country X, etc. Then on-device it checks my ID against that rule set, and simply returns a pass/fail result from those checks. This way the site would know if I’m allowed to be there, but they don’t get any specific or identifiable information about me. Maybe I’m 18, maybe I’m 56… they don’t know, they both simply send a pass. For a simple age check, a user’s exact birthday, name, address, etc are irrelevant, but I bet companies will get greedy and try to pull it anyway.

I see the monkey paw of the ID spec as leading to more companies seeking to get all our data, when they really don’t need it, and have shown they can’t be trusted with it.

I already see this with Apple Pay. When buying a digital item, some companies are awesome and simply take the payment with no other data. Others pull name, address, email, etc to make a payment when none of that is required.

The intent of the ISO spec is to allow you to request fine-grained data, like birth year only, but if you read the W3C standard, they explicitly call out privacy as a complex thing that maybe should be regulated.

The spec spells out the complexity: some ID verification processes actually need a lot of info! But some, like an alcohol age check, do not. The spec can do both, but it’s hard to differentiate these technically. The spec does lay out what user agents should do to make it clear which information is going where.

A bad scenario would be designing an API that is too hobbled to replace the invasive “photo of an ID” companies, which this spec seeks to do.

I’d prefer an open web standard that can be abused (with user consent) to a closed App Store-only API or the status quo

Aren't the regulations the problem here? If not for that nobody would be getting pressured to divulge this personal information to every shady app and website in the first place.

Suppose I want to make a service that verifies your age by asking you questions about what life was like before 9/11. Can I do that? And if I can't, is the problem the standards, or the law?

a) you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but

b) it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes and

c) Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents

Maybe something around only collecting minimal data, too.

Some of the first eager customers are banks with onerous KYC requirements – they want one click account creation! Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though, my bank knows quite a bit about me.

If the people writing the law cared about privacy they wouldn't have passed that one, and anybody who does would be repealing it rather than trying to find the best shade of lipstick for the pig.

> Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents

This is the part you don't need a law in order to do because the user can choose their user agent. Or if they can't, you should stop talking about any of this and go fix your antitrust problem.

> you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but

By conceding this you've already lost, because:

> it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes

This is the part which is hopeless. If they have the information, you're already screwed, because once they have it it's almost impossible for you or the government to know what they're doing with it, which makes those laws nearly impossible to enforce. And on top of that, a large part of the problem is what criminals or governments do once there is a legally-mandated database of all of that stuff, and those entities aren't constrained by laws.

Which is why anybody who really cares about this knows that the only solution is to not have the law requires that data to be collected.

> Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though

"Slippery slope is a fallacy", they said. "It's just one inch", they said.

I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data, due in part to data privacy laws like HIPAA. Consumer companies take COPPA seriously.

You absolutely cannot control what companies do with data, so you want to prevent its collection in the first place – but you can penalize them when they do something wrong, which does influence their beyavior. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of the GDPR, but to say it had no effect would be an odd claim.

I'm glad I didn't get a diagnosis and treatment for ADHD, ADD, or autism.

The enemy is also government, especially with RFK's anti-autism trend, along with trawling through all medical records with those diagnoses.

Insurance companies are laughing all the way to the bank.

Without overstretching the metaphor, it is quite revealing - you wouldn't see your primary care doctor selling that information whether they are or aren't. You don't have an effective way of monitoring the situation. Nobody outside the hypothetical transaction does.

It is common for that sort of situation to go bad if the economics of selling the data make sense despite the risk of getting caught.

It is revealing: I went to same PCP for the first 18 years of my life and he was incredible as a doctor. He ran his own practice. He was also a great IT admin: he managed his own records, paid to digitize all of them including mine. If he betrayed that trust I’d be sad.

But I hear you. A product just needs to come along that provides some benefit, or the practice could be acquired, etc

The healthcare provider uses an EHR. They might have some managed service provider managing their IT assets and their EHR deployment. Two companies they have BAAs with. That EHR company could be cloud hosted, another BAA. They probably rely on other tools and contractors which might have BAAs. Later on when they go to bill they exchange that billing data through billing analysis tools (another BAA) and then submit to a clearing house (another BAA). All of those companies probably have companies they work with that potentially need BAAs as well, if they work directly with that PHI data in the role of working on behalf of that healthcare provider.

One trip to the doctor could potentially involve dozens of companies you've never heard of that might have a business use case to handle your healthcare data in some way or fashion and none of them actually sold that data or mishandled it under HIPAA.

I'm not going to do the legwork for you, but you should be looking around for the way Google is transferring the medical information on 50 million Americans as part of Project Nightingale a few years back, and you should be looking very seriously at medical sites that use Google Analytics in direct violation of HIPAA. The situation here is very much like the situation with the government collecting detailed profiles on every citizen and knowing their location in real time: they're not supposed to be doing it, but the reality is they can and they do.

Snowden's leaks were another great example about how the law doesn't actually matter, if you can't see whether or not it's being enforced.

My point here is if you're counting on the system to protect you, you're going to be disappointed.

Recent example was that I was supposed to give up my ID because I lost my 2FA for a particular site and I refused because I didn't believe they would delete my ID. My friends said that I was paranoid.

https://www.404media.co/id-verification-service-for-tiktok-u...

Oh, you sweet summer child. Bless your little heart. You're right. Doctors don't. Insurance companies do! And that data is passed around like hotcakes to make actuarial datasets which basically have the effect of ensuring premium go up! Several states, in fact, have done everything they can lobbying wise to make sure it remains okay to trade in your personal health data! Also, from personal experience at a PBM, it is at least an offering to get covered populational reports on spend done on behalf of your covered group, meaning employers are given a view of the overall health of their workforce and what that translates to in dollars out the door on their behalf. Information that, of course, would never be used to do strategic layoffs or cross correlation with time taken off to further optimize for cost reduction right?

(Note: if I've had this idea, and rejected it on moral/ethical/legal grounds, there are absolutely people who have had it and hasn't done so).

If we're admitting solutions that aren't 100% effective, why can't we admit solutions that aren't 100% effective but are much better at preserving privacy?

How is this improving? It's the most invasive proposal yet, serves to prohibit devices that are controlled by their owners and still doesn't actually work because a) there are still a zillion devices with security vulnerabilities and b) none of this applies to websites hosted in other jurisdictions, so you're not actually limiting the access of minors to anything, you're only inconveniencing anyone who does have servers in the US or interacts with any that are. Which is an extremely large number of people to trouble for a benefit that rounds to zero.

> Surely we shouldn’t give up and regulate nothing...

When we're in the category of speech, let's go with this option all the way to the wall.

I think a lot of us are wary of a world where we have limited selections of software stacks that we can run and do essential things. At some point, we don't own the devices anymore.

I like that Apple is a benevolent overlord, for now.

But I like to be able to run software that I control and participate in the world, and that has alternated between being somewhat harder and prohibitively so. Lockdown of devices (chain of trust, mandatory signed binaries, limitations of device drivers, bootloaders that won’t unlock) makes it increasingly difficult to experiment, repair, or even trust the tools we rely on, and is viewed as a prerequisite for many of these solutions.

--

(I appreciate the alternatives are really hard, and that there are substantial potential downsides creating pressure towards these types of solutions, above and beyond the desires to lock down marketplaces and capture rents).

I don’t see digital identity documents as a threat, though. It’s mostly orthogonal to software provenance, device ownership, secure boot, etc.

PS: we already live in a world where by and large all the software you use is only licensed to you individually. It’s crap. If digital identity makes this more plainly obvious then good. We need fuel to fight unethically and impractically licensed software.

This is true even if the protocols themselves protect privacy well, use zero knowledge proofs, etc… if Google can vacuum it all up from the device representing me, all the privacy-centric design makes no difference.

Biometric data isn't cryptographic in nature. Once you've recorded someone's fingerprint -- which any device using it for authentication would have to do and have the hardware to do -- you can then replay it to any service using the same data for authentication. You don't even have to lift them off of any of the objects people leave them on just by existing, which is also a way to get them. And once someone has them, you can't change it.

Which means the only way to use biometrics to gate this sort of thing is for everyone to be locked out of their own devices (or unable to use devices they're not locked out of), or they could use the device they control to play back the biometric data to whatever external service is nominally authenticating it.

> Which zillion vulnerabilities in the TPM are you referring to?

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=TPM

And those are only the ones specific to a TPM, not any of the ones that impact privileged code the TPM is attesting to the security of.

Notice also that this doesn't require every device to be vulnerable, it only requires any device to be vulnerable. Cheap devices are more likely to be vulnerable and then anyone who wants to bypass anything can get one of those.

This is one of the reasons these systems are so nefarious. You get an iPhone for unrelated reasons and it may not have any current known vulnerabilities, so you are locked out of your own device. Meanwhile some $50 Android or old netbook does have a vulnerability which any kid can get if they want to view age-gated sites, or people set up services to do it over the internet -- and then those services become attack vectors because kids start plugging their parents' IDs and fingerprints into shady bypass services.

The biometric data doesn't leave the device in any of these protocols. Keybinding to TPM keys and Wallet provenance is used. I’m not sure you really understand how this works it sounds more like you have a basic FUD imagining a world where instead of literally uploading a photo of your drivers license you present a digitally signed certificate with the same info. I can’t really argue with FUD other than encouraging you to onboard an mDL version of your government ID and to try using it the next time you fly, provided you live somewhere where this technology has been made available. It’s demonstrably better and you can experience it or talk to someone who has today.

If the discussion was a question of whether to regulate or not, I’d see more where you’re coming from. But the discussion is about how to effectively respond to the enforcement of existing laws now against websites. Society has grown up and we’re not comfortable giving the internet a pass because digital identity is hard.

Showing your driver's license to the store clerk didn't used to mean the store kept a copy.

Most of the important regulations around these things have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Requiring bourbon not to contain methanol and adult performers to be tested for STDs aren't related to the internet.

And once we're talking about the internet, those things are in a different category because alcohol and cigarettes are physical objects. You can't download vodka from Russia.

Whereas if you want to stop kids from downloading porn from other parts of the world, the police state that would require is the thing wars have been fought against and righteously so. Not because of the porn but because of what it would take to actually make those laws effective, and what it would be used for as soon as it's in place.

But ineffective laws aren't worth having, because they're all costs with no benefits, not least because then people will keep trying to make them effective and the only means to do that is the police state.

> Society has grown up and we’re not comfortable giving the internet a pass because digital identity is hard.

I feel like this kind of language is designed to make people angry. As if you're not an adult if you can look at a trade off against privacy and free speech and say "that's not worth having" instead of implementing every creeping authoritarian proposal specifically because the last one didn't solve the problem.

We've been living in exactly that world for decades without issue.

It makes perfect sense for meat space to be treated differently from the internet. A downloaded picture of a cigarette can't be smoked. The only thing that can happen on the internet is the exchange of data, and an ID requirement for that is absurd.

> there are much more “legitimate” use cases for ID verification that happen entirely online with no meatspace concerns like banking and underwriting etc. so it’s somewhat a straw man to get hung up on porn

Amazing how those use cases have survived for these decades without such a law. If I don't need to send a copy of my ID every time I sign into my bank account, what possible argument could be made for the requirement I do so to watch porn?

> Whether the restrictions are justified or not or stupid or not, we’ve decided they should exist

No, we have not collectively decided they should exist. Plenty of laws exist which are unpopular either because of the goal or the execution. Even if a law has majority support, that doesn't mean the minority can't argue against keeping or expanding it. A restriction being unjustified or stupid is a very good argument for not doing additional unjustified or stupid things to enforce that law. It's rather silly that there is a federal law forbidding leaving the country with more than $25 in nickels but it's on the books. Ensuring this law is thoroughly enforced with universal mandatory cavity searches looking for rolls of nickels would be indefensible.

The hacked up solutions for the things existing “perfectly fine” over the last few decades are complete crap. Anybody who’s ever had to take photos of their ID then a confirmation selfie knows this. Anybody who’s had to apply for a loan or open a bank account online knows this. We have wonderfully secure cryptography and you’re arguing we should keep using plastic cards that you can’t even sha256sum.

Yes there is and we all grew up in that world.

Not everything needs or should have strong ID. But no I don’t want my children stumbling into a porn site because they got click jacked by unscrupulous advertisements they never consented to being solicited with. I don’t want them learning about the world that way. A simple age check without revealing any personal info supported by the digital credential standards being discussed here would absolutely be an improvement.

Having my age checked at the time of purchase for alcohol rather than having to present my ID to the delivery person would also be an improvement.

I'm not comfortable giving society digital identity, because being a human and not abusing the primitive is even harder still. And we can't take it back once we've built it. It's just there for every wannabe despot to start building systems of oppression with. And there's an awful lot of them running around with the "best of intentions" to line the way to hell.

For example, I was involved in a project several years ago on this where this was explored before the big vendors became players. The issue we were studying was abuse of credentials in-person - many bars will capture people’s identity information when validating IDs.

The ability to provide only the attribute securely is awesome, but of course the systematic abuse of this technology by the reactionaries among us will drive adoption.

I generally agree with your points, but I wouldn't trust Apple, or any publicly traded company, to have any kind of ethics. Just because their incentive to make as much profit as possible, leads to them trying to differentiate themselves from other companies, and thus they choose to temporarily align with privacy concerns doesn't mean they will not compromise on them, if they see better profits elsewhere.

I rather have privacy enforcing regulations like the GDPR or policies that go even further, than relying on publicly traded companies to protect their users.

The website sends the verification function to the user device. The user device then returns a proof that it knows an input that the verification function accepts.

The verification function should include a digital signature check.

This is generally possible already with SSI based credentials, including standards created by W3C.

Eg. Yivy: https://docs.yivi.app/technical-overview/

Except for the additional download requirement for a user, the friction is pretty low once it’s setup and you have created some attributes.

The project would benefit from a rebranding review, standardization, an enterprise-capable infrastructure to promote and support alternative service providers, and a review of clients. The current Yivi mobile app hasn’t changed much over the years and when I last used it I still needed a PIN instead Face ID.

Apple wasn’t there when I was and even broader Google joined about 6 months after I left Google in 2015 (I was just proactive about seeing the standard coming) but the big players hopped on board later in the process.

We were all also acutely aware of the privacy implications and making sure the bodies would sign records of >18, >21 to avoid having to share too much info (pre ZKproofs being more widely accepted recognized).

Don't forget: these are the upstanding members of society who brought the dystopia to you.

This is simplistic. I think you'll find parents are not a uniform bloc in favor of this kind of overreach.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

I bet we could even get a major phone OS vendor to support such a thing…

https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...

Individual smartphones with biometrics are these days a whole-of-society norm, technologists have developed a mature body of cryptographic work to assert ZKPs, the US population seem to have lost their aversion to centralized ID systems… and the periodic moral panic about the kids seems to be at a high tide.

In the same way that Apple don’t prevent, say, Safari from being used for prurient purposes, or Final Cut Pro from being used to edit naughty bits, I don’t see why they wouldn’t want an opinionated implementation as a concept develops of a generic “digital tool to assert your age, and only that.” Especially since Android is doing it and leaning into the privacy angle.

This can be done, its not that crazy, it just requires a bunch of people to get their heads out of their sand in regards to tech and blockchain, which admittedly might be a harder problem.

——

Additonal thought- if you don’t understand what I’m saying or have a negative reaction just plug the comment + thread context into an LLM and see what it says / ask for a clearer explanation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390

Unless of course they're planning on making us go to some facility to ensure our phones get the digital components of the IDs get loaded into the secure enclave? Which sounds dystopian as heck given the scenes coming out of the US right now.

You're practically forced to have a Google/Apple account and a google/apple smartphone to even exist in today's world.

Not to mention that you're almost certainly going to have to tie this stuff to specific accounts that will then forever and ever keep your habits collected. One day somebody enterprising is going to add all that data together too.

Mullvad is the only VPN I know of that has a mode that normalizes all packets to the same size (going into the VPN) and sends fake packets that don't get sent as real traffic. But that's only obfuscation and, at low traffic or high bandwidth (videos) or with sufficient heuristics, it can be beaten.

The US has basically zero regulation on selling this data. I can imagine a world where within a couple decades the US has one of the largest blackmail crisis ever seen, as foreign governments target civil workers. Or, I guess, at this point, the US government against the "undesirable" party within this administration.

Zero knowledge proofs are not vulnerable to traffic analysis the same way VPNs are.

For instance: The relying party server needs to call the auth server on novel users. Thats a new, unavoidable indicator!

How large are token batches and how long do they last? Will the implementation force them to wait a time period between redemption and use?

A bad implementation means the user IP will talk to the A server, then it will contact the RP server, who will contact the A server. Because this happens once per connection (or 60 minutes in this bill) and takes maybe a few hundred milliseconds. there's not going to be a huge number of candidates to have to sort through. And that's just the handshake.

Not really. There is no requirement here for an auth server to neccesarily even exist.

That said, your broader point is correct, that the details matter a tremendous amount.

Very cool! Always happy to be proven wrong with cool tech!

All comms are subject to traffic analysis except surreptitious, covert channels (which can't be covert if the implementations are widely available).

Zero knowledge proof is not a marketing term, its a math term. Maybe sometimes they are implemented wrong, but if they are implemented correctly its pretty rock solid. Certainly more rock solid than much cryptography which rests on sketchy foundations.

In past HN comments this apparently exists IRL in Germany and/or Canada, where age can be proven via a smartphone without leaking one's identity to the verifier and without any communication back to the government.

Characterizing the entire development of software and the internet in 90s-2000s as based on libertarian techno-utopinanism is largely manufactured narrative though. One I keep seeing pop up more and more. Largely by people trying to push poorly though out authoritarian gov-controlled internet by spinning the present internet (and parenting) as a product of some ideological radicalism.

And personally I'd say mass shootings are primarily encouraged by corporate mass media (including social media) glorifying the events and the shooters, rather than anonymous message board speech.

I do know how deep the sophomorically-justified rabbit hole goes, in that I've read a fair amount of dark enlightenment material. I actually credit Moldbug's writing for helping me go from defaulting to fundamentalist-axiomatic analysis (rightist) to leftist-constructive-qualitative analysis (leftist) - top down hierarchy is utterly incapable of responding to the complexity of the world, and only sounds so appealing post-facto when a singular coherent narrative has been written.

And, as with Facebook, the main issue was the ways in which each platform perpetuated old social ills, not the ways in which they freed users.

Lastly, the tragedy of each is that it would have been entirely possible for ethical actors to takeover or fork each platform to scrub them of the ills and to promote the good. Bluesky is making a try of it vis a vis Twitter, and while my hopes aren't high that it will be an ultimate solution, I appreciate that there's finally been at least an attempt.

To stop these disgusting freaks from polluting the SA forums with their child pornography and degeneracy, Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka closed the anime subforum (ATDRW aka Anime Tentacle Death Rape Whorehouse) and moot started 4chan.

So yeah, 4chans early legacy is ‘a bunch of pedophiles were mad they couldn’t share their abuse images’ which later transitioned into a love of fascism. What a great place… NOT.

P.S. Adults who like anime are fundamentally broken, it’s children’s entertainment.

The general facts are true, my opinion of anime fans is my own

Americans will blame everything but their gun laws.

It most decidedly did not mean “freedom from corporate hegemony” which is how we are where we are now, where children are matched with pedophile groomers[1] and delivered endless advertisements for freelance porn practitioners for profit.

This version of freedom isn’t a free internet at all. That was just a PR pitch. And it wasn’t really a great idea to begin with, since it ends up leading to where we are now.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-06/instagram...

Yes, which is why we are not in the early internet anymore and fully into surveillance capitalism, algorithmic social media.

But here’s the thing. This effort to stop these corporations from delivering unlimited porn to children is a step in the right direction. Which is restraining the activity of these companies to hurt people.

Which is why calls for the old “free” internet are now, like then, bullshit.

I know they taught you about slippery slopes in elementary school social studies, and I assume you've educated yourself not only of the past but also with speculative material such as 1984. If not, I'm not sure why you feel qualified to make the claims you're making.

Giving unlimited porn to kids is not “good, actually” and it was illegal before the internet and it’s a frustrating accident of history that nobody understood the implications of Section 230 at the time.

The internet is a core infrastructure commercial enterprise and what it produces should be subject to standard product regulations.

Would you like to try again?

No, it's not.

It's about regulating consumer product safety. The above argument is one employed to avoid that obvious fact. Nobody wants to decide what you can email another adult. We want to make these giant conglomerate tech companies accountable for the harm they cause to people. Giving massive amounts of unlimited porn to children is harmful and we shouldn't be OK with it.

I get that "oh think of the children" is often used disingenuously. So what? This isn't one of those times.

> So what? This isn't one of those times.

It 100% is, and you cannot see it because you yourself are caught in the fervor.

If you don't want to visit a website, don't visit it. If you don't want your child to visit a website, block it. But to force website operators to check IDs at the door through sketchy third party services so that other consenting individuals can use their services is just batshit insane and a gigantic slippery slope towards a State-run internet that criminalizes all non-sanctioned speech. You need to look past your little hang up and understand the bigger picture.

This is going to impact every book out there, creating an environment where the authors simply can't tell their stories anymore because of someone's moral shock.

Bad things happen in stories to characters, and authors need that flexibility. Its the journey in overcoming these things that makes the story good. The moment you or an author can't express reality without it being a felony, is the moment you no longer have real writers.

Some people don't write for money, and these things impose untenable cost on everyone.

I actually considered this question and after thinking about it, despite everything going on, I think it boils down to lack of privacy as my biggest gripe in the modern world

It’s such a tough concept to explain to the if you don’t have anything to hide crowd, but if someone wants to disappear, I don’t care if for good or bad reasons, they should be able to

If you don’t want the government on you, if you don’t want people you know to find you, if you just want to reinvent yourself, it doesn’t matter why - you should be able to do this. It just “feels” like an innate right. Normally I don’t like to argue using “vibes” as justification, but this to me is just part of my value system/morals which is inherently arbitrary to begin with

Encroaching on this privacy encroaches on a bunch of other rights, like free speech as you’ve mentioned

The fact that this is the case makes it even clearer to me that privacy is a basic fundamental primitive

Would love to hear alternative perspectives and other justifications for or against privacy

Anti government folk from the USA hated them and decided they were government overreach.

Privacy from companies maybe, privacy from governments and cops, certainly not.

Informed consent laws - good. Laws about third-party tracking - good. So it's some good, some bad.

But, on the topic of encryption, it's not like the US is pure here either.

The EU is not a monolith. There are many people pushing in many different directions. Sometimes the result is good, sometimes less so.

It is very much not clear to me that you should have privacy from governments or cops. Aren't the whole point of the government and cops that they are the institutions we have created to entrust with this access?

That is exactly what the EU is trying to do with the Chat Control law. Targeted law enforcement access to some data is not what is being discussed here.

We are talking about 24/7/365 mass surveillance without warrants and without the suspicion of any crime committed.

Secondly, incitement to violence is illegal in most countries. If you think it's not in yours, why not try it and see where you end up?

By all means, if that's the way you want to represent the issue, then there is no discussion to be had.

I will, however, represent it this way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...

I can be compelled in a few situations in this incomplete list were of the "deserved" type. But you can't convince me on all of them.

I only imagine it changing after a significant cultural change in which the economic value is not held as higher than the value of privacy, but would be delighted to be wrong in this regard.

Its nice to have a little space, and to have your own thoughts and opinions, but not at the expense of civilisation.

People should not be able to use privacy to evade responsibility or debts.

We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility.

Final thought is that this is precisely why government and politics is not a joke and needs to be taken seriously. We need small transparent governments we can trust and that are a held accountable.

If you don't trust your government, you've got bigger problems than your privacy.

Dude I'm sure most people are okay with their neighbors knowing their names and addresses. We're talking about the governments and megacorps here. Theses are not "communities" in any traditional sense.

> small transparent governments

No developed country has that. Not EU and definitely not the US.

> If you don't trust your government

No one should 100% trust their government.

Sure, but is this a measure that appropriately balances it?

I think the traditional view is that the balance should be: your rights end where they start stepping on another person's rights.

We aren't really talking about someone else being harmed, we are talking about (at worst) someone harming themselves. There is no other person being harmed.

On the other hand, porn habits are a great way to blackmail people. When the identity data gets leaked, it will very easily ruin lives.

From a balance perspective, i don't really think it follows that the benefits are worth the potential harms. I think civilization is best preserved by not doing this.

But there won't be.

Because the ultimate purpose of laws like this isn't really to prevent minors from accessing porn. Ultimately, it's to

1) outlaw porn for everyone, because it's "sinful", and

2) outlaw discussions and depictions of queer—and more specifically, nowadays, especially trans—issues, because according to them, anything queer is automatically pornographic, no matter how tame the actual content is.

Close, but it's worse than that -- they don't want LGBTQ+ material merely banned; they want LGBTQ+ people dead, or at the very least banned from all public life. The next step is where they call for the death penalty for child abuse (also in Project 2025). So according to them LGBTQ+ is pornographic -> pornography is child abuse -> child abuse is punishable by death -> therefore existing as a queer person is punishable by death.

Just see how any criticism of dear leader gets flagged in mere minutes now.

> Transgender people will see their existence denied and their rights stripped away under Project 2025. The authors equate "transgender ideology" to pornography, calling for it to be outlawed. While the far-right policy agenda cannot directly ban transgenderism, it aims to do so indirectly by labeling it as pornography, and then outlawing pornography itself - effectively erasing transgender identity from the U.S.

Source: https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/project-2025-lgbtq-rights...

the search term 'transgender' appears 13 times largely in screeds against the things the authors don't like, these are followed by dot point actions to take to eliminate the mote in their neighbour's eye.

  Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.

  Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection.

  * Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists;

  Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.

  What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism.

  * Restrict the application of Bostock. The new Administration should restrict Bostock’s application of sex discrimination protections to sexual orientation and transgender status in the context of hiring and firing.

  * Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.

Of course conservatives are hypocrites. All they care about are their end goals, and they will say and do whatever they need to say and do in order to achieve them.

One of those goals involves enshrining Christian values into law. Christian values themselves are often hypocritical and contradictory. And inconsistent: ask 10 Christians to weigh in on a thorny moral issue and you'll get 15 different answers.

And on top of that, the conservatives in power have a fetish for using those power structures to enrich themselves and their cronies, under the guise of "small government" and "free markets".

I don't think exposing conservative hypocrisy is a winning or useful strategy anymore. Conservatives are masters at cognitive dissonance, and at hand-waving away inconsistencies in their views, or the very real, very negative consequences of their policy plans. I'm not sure what the right strategy is, though. And perhaps this is why liberals fail to win hearts and minds when it matters.

Whenever anyone has economic woes, there are still plenty of people out there who will reflexively say "maybe we needs some Republicans in charge for a bit, they're more fiscally responsible and will help small businesses" etc etc.

And Republicans will happily run on those ideas.

And then not execute them.

So someone needs to be hammering home the fact that it's lies - that Republicans will only help the wealthy and giant corporations, that they don't care a whit for the deficit, that they will spend spend spend on their pet issues and crony projects - until it stops being an effective campaign soundbite.

On The Right of the media economy, you surface the best narratives, and there are no penalties for being inaccurate. Because everything is opinion and rhetorical tricks, saying “It’s terrible what happened in this Dem state. Here’s how the dems caused it” and then being able to say “we never said that dems were monsters”, while platforming fringe theories like pizza gate.

If you go against the narrative you just dont get airtime and attention - meaning you get no revenue or political power. Worse, you might get primaried.

Hammering the truth means nothing, because you would only be selling it back to the center and the left.

The right is interested in facts, only to the point that they support their goals. It’s a protected market.

You can’t really outcompete rackets, but you can’t really restrict speech without getting hit by free speech arguments.

It’s a problem worth solving though, and its a problem worth learning about.

One thing that seems to work isn’t counter speech, its angry speech. It’s not the pro-vax group that gets credence vs the anti-vaxxers, it’s the anti-anti-vaxxers who do it.

I wish people had better ideas, but its hard to even realize the specifics of the market failure.

With that said, even now, it’s normal that liquor stores only look at IDs without transmitting or recording the information anywhere (in the absence of fraud concerns), so if the purchase itself is made with cash, it has most (not quite all) of the same data privacy and security consequences as a true anonymous purchase.

This is very different from the online porn age verification proposals.

That's not entirely true - once you look old enough most places will stop asking for ID.

As for why: because there is (or at least, was) no other system to identify whether someone is underage and, by extension, more likely to underestimate the consequences of their actions, make worse choices under the effect of alcohol, and suffer its effects more strongly. Same reason why the legal system makes a difference between minors and adults.

Now, I still hate the idea that any corporation is storing my ID, but it's not every Tom Dicken' Harry porn site you might be viewing.

We know that very few organizations are capable of effectively controlling confidential information that they're legally bound to keep confidential. Requiring things that are going to lead to large stores of ID images is asking for trouble.

When you show your ID in a store, the clerk generally doesn't retain a copy of it, and if they do, it's apparent because they take the card to scan it... regardless, they can't take the scanned copy and present it at another store, because the other store will detect that it's not an original.

I agree with you that systems that store those IDs are ticking bombs.

I run a pi-hole that blocks ads and porn, but that’s way beyond the technical capability of probably 95% of people. There are some commercial products but they are expensive and also take time and at least a little tech ability to set up.

… and of course any phone with 5G/LTE gets around this. Cellular is impossible to police.

Tough luck, I say. If you’re going to bring humans into this world, you better do a great job at it and not externalize responsibility or create a nuisance for others.

If these legislators cared about keeping kids safe, they’d be focused on getting them off social media, not stopping adults from exercising free speech.

None of my non-technical relatives have Comcast, so I’m not sure how it would work out. It works fine on ATT, Verizon, Cox and Spectrum though.

It really isn’t, and even if it were an ISP could offer it. Indeed I believe most ISPs do (I chose one which is unfiltered, I do my own filtering at a router and dns level, the biggest threat is DoH)

If you are too busy to parent, then you shouldn't be one in the first place.

It is very hard for parents who aren’t tech savvy or are busy (single parents or both work) to police this stuff.

I’m playing devils advocate because if we pretend this isn’t a problem eventually governments will force onerous regulation. It is a problem. We need to come up with better solutions if we don’t want worse ones.

It’s devils advocate because I think while kids shouldn’t be looking at porn the brain rot shit is at least as bad and possibly worse. Kids YouTube is a lobotomy.

May be such inept people who don't care that much about their kids as to setup parent control shouldn't have kids in the first place? Why we all should take a hit to our rights/business/etc. just because of such careless and irresponsible parents?

Your kids is your personal responsibility. It the same story again and again - why can't these conservative people own their personal responsibilities without hoisting its costs onto the others?

Implying that they don't care about their kids, or shouldn't have kids as a result, is a pretty awful thing to say.

Especially when everyone who would have this particular "problem" has access to various search tools and video websites that would explain "solutions".

If my older family member was scammed by something online, and someone said "lack of knowledge is no excuse," I think they'd really be missing the mark. Or if they shouldn't reproduce because they aren't good with technology.

It's a very HN take but it's one that lacks a lot of humanity.

I have actually. And do so pretty regularly.

But the comment I was replying to was presumably not about older adults, and more so about younger parents of minor children, whom I wouldn't normally class as "older adults", and for the most part I would think know basic skills like using a search engine and/or Youtube (or some other video sharing app)

Even though I could predict what side HN would stand on any sort of internet freedom post, reading through all the reasonable yet greyed-out comments in this thread feels like HN's last dying breath as a place for genuine debate.

This site can be really gross sometimes. I want to think it's just that the site skews young and people just don't know. I might have said similar things when I was 20.

These were problems from before the age of devices. If anything car oriented development has made it easier to control your children's experience diet by controlling their physical proximity.

Fundamentally I think you just need to trust your kids beyond a certain point. Do your best to build constructive consumption habits with them (including restricting access to devices as needed), help build good moral frameworks, but always remember that the world is messy and it's your child's job to synthesize their upbringing with their experiences. We all did the same while growing up

I'm going to have to upload 3D models of my face and pictures of my ID just to use the internet because... some people don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet?

Kind of unfortunate that PICS[1][2] and POWDER[3][4] never really took off: it allowed web sites to 'self-label' and then browsers (and proxies?) could use the metadata and built-in rules/filters to determine if the content should be displayed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...

[2] https://www.w3.org/PICS/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...

[4] https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/

Congress critters should be opposed to the centralized ID verification systems as their browsing habbits will be exposed to the world when those sites ooopsie dooopsie "leak" the data or just openly sell it or an employee turns that data into a summarized online spreadsheet of who is into what. The kickbacks and lobbying they may be potentially receiving will not be worth it.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single

[2] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R... [dont follow the links, NSFW]

Would that require MiTM at the network level? Or, is there a custom X.509 RTA that would tell clients not to accept the certificate?

As of this ruling, all sites within striking distance of South Dakota must take “reasonable efforts” to age-verify, or be certain that no content could ever be politically harmful to the hypothetical minor.

As an adult, no-one is forcing you to view pornographic websites. If you don't want to provide your ID as per these laws, simply refrain from viewing. It really is that straightforward a choice.

Now, I can get behind some censorship if it's for very good reasons. As soon as it's for moralistic reasons, you've lost me. This is a morality law. Morality laws are bad, period. We need real, concrete reasons for blocking content and enforcing censorship - not morality.

Why not? Because morals change from person to person and throughout history. What an evangelical thinks is moral is different from what I think is moral.

If the internet existed during times of slavery, would they have censored websites addressing freedom because it is "immoral"? In my mind, yes. That's a problem with the entire thought process. So, we should throw the thought process out.

I don't know what the future holds in 10 years, 20 years, 30. I don't want to be bound to laws that rely solely on morality. That's just asking for trouble.

I mean, even just the word "pornography" is a moral footgun. Who defines that? Because a large portion of the US believes anything containing homosexuals is automatically pornographic, regardless of the material.

Of course this means that any adult, when challenged, who refuses to show ID as proof of age, will be denied service. But again that refusal is their choice. They voluntarily refrained from complying with the access requirements.

How is this substantially different to an adult refusing to show ID to access an age-restricted website?

Once the service or good is sold, all bets are off. The clerk at the corner store might ask for your ID to buy alcohol, yes. But they do not follow you home to ensure you don't give wine to your kid.

And, if they did, would you be comfortable with that? I think no. Why not? Privacy. I don't want a random clerk watching me every time I decide to drink or smoke. It's a violation of my privacy.

So, privacy - there's your answer, that's the difference.

Do you refuse to watch age-restricted films in the cinema because the owner of the cinema might have a record of what you've watched? Age-restricted websites are no different. You can comply with the access requirement, or refrain from using the service. It's your freedom of choice.

No-one is forcing you to watch 18-rated films at the cinema, or purchase alcohol or drugs, or view pornographic material online. If you don't like the requirement to prove your age by presenting some form of ID, then all you need to do is voluntarily refrain from these and any other age-restricted activities.

> Do you refuse to watch age-restricted films in the cinema because the owner of the cinema might have a record of what you've watched?

For me, no. For others, yes.

But this is a different degree of privacy to what we're talking about. It's not the same, and you cannot make the jump for free.

What I mean is, just because I am okay with this degree of privacy violation, does not mean I consent to all privacy violations which may ever exist. Again, you might be fine with an R-rated movie - but you, yourself, would not be fine with a store clerk living at your house to ensure you don't give kids alcohol. So you, yourself, understand and live by the principle.

> Any child with a laptop or phone, or any other device that can connect to a wifi hotspot, can access it.

Similarly, any child living in my house can access my scotch.

It is up to me, the person who purchased the good or service, to ensure that doesn't happen. It is not up to a third-party like the store clerk. If I am a business, it is then up to me that the internet I provide is adequately censored. Which is what happens in practice.

Do you see the problem yet?

Sgould I say "Cambridge Analytica" now or later?

> Do you refuse to watch age-restricted films in the cinema because the owner of the cinema might have a record of what you've watched?

I can't imagine that there aren't many people who refrain from watching all sorts of content in public out of privacy concerns.

>If you don't like the requirement to prove your age by presenting some form of ID, then all you need to do is voluntarily refrain from these and any other age-restricted activities.

I certainly don't, and I would definitely oppose this being made into law.

The issue here is there's a difference between a mainstream service, like a cinema, and a tiny author website which probably gets a few hundred hits a months at most.

And the ultimate ideological aim is to take all erotica offline. Especially any kind of queer erotica.

This is using ID issues for ideological censorship, not trying to set up an ID system to streamline access to adult material by adult consumers.

Block kids at the on ramp to the internet, all the problems go away. I just don't understand what I'm missing here, why do we allow kids to use the internet?

The servers storing this information have been hacked in the past and it will happen again in the future. The fewer places your ID lives, the lower the risk of it leaking.

Even if you don’t view the data as sensitive, it still associates a person with a website. Depending on the site, that can have negative ramifications in a person’s life. This is especially true when certain websites get associated with various political leaning and when the data leaks, the people who happened to be registered (for whatever their reason) get attacked.

My company has rules against retaliation. Good luck proving that’s the reason you didn’t get promoted, or were left off of a project. People get left off projects and don’t get promoted all the time. Keeping your job because the company is legally obligated to sounds like an uncomfortable working environment.

The mode for treating trans kids is puberty blockers until they’re 18 and then they can choose their own treatment - but that pathway is being blocked by more and more laws and fear mongering about kids being transitioned against their will

We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)

The government, for good or bad, regulates all healthcare, and that government is guided by its voters.

The majority of voters don't see this as a bigger problem than the issue they are currently voting on.

That began in 1906; it's hardly something we've "always done".

As someone else pointed out, the idea of gov deciding what our doctors can and cant give us is a VERY modern concept.

But your examples: arsnic & crack

1. Cocaine is legal for doctors to prescribe and use in specific circumstances. What is legally prohibited is recreational use. Most of the restrictions on use are due to the threat of addiction, not the threat of appropriate medical use.

2. Arsnic is similarly entirely legal for medical use. Restrictions are around putting it in FOOD because it’s POISON. Nobody is saying you can’t treat cancer with it, if it’s shown to be effective.

Your examples are not examples of the majority regulating medical care for individuals.

Many later detransition, but the damage is already done by that point. That states are now banning this as a form of child abuse, is a welcome move in the right direction.

For a trans kid, going thru the wrong puberty is harmful. The best thing would be hormones at puberty. But given issues around informed consent, puberty blockers are a valid compromise.

Calling them harmful without considering the harm of the alternative is not honest.

Given the definition of maturity is being fully grown, this comes across as an inherently unhelpful thing to ask. If we say “only once someone is fully grown they are able to determine if they experienced the incorrect puberty” then this makes it impossible to help children who are going to experience the incorrect puberty. Unless we have some way to determine a child is trans without any input from them, there becomes no way to help them.

What's next, gene therapy because the embryo might want to be a different race when it grows up?

This conception of the "wrong puberty" as something that needs to be blocked is as absurd as all that "born in the wrong body" ideological nonsense.

Most importantly, children can't meaningfully consent to having their sexual function permanently damaged.

Why do you think you can’t experience the wrong one? Also, unless you are saying there is only one sex, how could there only be one puberty?

To take female puberty as an example, this is the growth and development of the uterus, ovaries, labia and breasts to reach their mature form and function. Most importantly, the menstrual cycle begins, making pregnancy possible.

If a boy has testosterone blocked and is given estrogen instead, he doesn't experience any of this, except perhaps some breast tissue growth and redistribution of fat. His penis and testicles will not develop further and he will probably remain sterile.

However, he doesn't have a female reproductive system, so this is not more similar to female puberty. What he's experiencing is stunted male development, a pharmaceutically-induced eunuch state.

There is no option for him to go through female puberty rather than male puberty, because he lacks the type of reproductive system that would make this possible. As female puberty is not an experience available to him, it makes no sense to describe male puberty as being the "wrong puberty" for him.

Likewise for girls and the impossibility of experiencing male puberty.

Who are we to question God's natural order? If a 9 year old girl with precocious puberty is uncomfortable being oggled by old men, that's just fine because puberty can never be wrong.

Besides, she can't meaningfully consent to medically delaying puberty, anyway.

> Besides, she can't meaningfully consent to medically delaying puberty, anyway.

Yes, indeed she can't.

Learning about adverse side effects by talking about their experiences is LITERALLY what you’re advocating for a ban on. I’d say by any basic morality you’re not allowed to cite that as evidence if you want it banned.

This is ideological nonsense.

https://apnews.com/article/uk-transgender-health-care-childr...

[Citation needed]

“The Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria Study (1972–2015): Trends in Prevalence, Treatment, and Regrets” (DOI: 10.1016/j.jsxm.2018.01.016).

The word “many” is misleading – it’s less than 1 %. It’s not nothing, but it’s low.

This isn't the desistence rate of children, this is the regret rate of adults who transition.

All the studies among gender dysphoric children who are not prescribed puberty blockers show desistence rates over 70%

There are studies that show very low desistence rates - many in the single digits. But those are studies among children that are given puberty blockers.

Here's what more reliable studies from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest professional group of pediatricians in the country, say[2]:

> Gender Identity 5 Years After Social Transition

> We found that an average of 5 years after their initial social transition, 7.3% of youth had retransitioned at least once. At the end of this period, most youth identified as binary transgender youth (94%), including 1.3% who retransitioned to another identity before returning to their binary transgender identity. A total of 2.5% of youth identified as cisgender and 3.5% as nonbinary. Later cisgender identities were more common among youth whose initial social transition occurred before age 6 years; their retransitions often occurred before age 10 years.

[1] https://downloads.regulations.gov/ED-2022-OCR-0143-141953/at...

[2] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/2/e20210...

This does not contradict what I have written: when gender dysphoric children are met with an affirming model of care and given gender affirming care, very few of them desist in their cross-sex gender identity. When they given a neutral, observational model of care not not prescribed puberty blockers, the majority of them desist. The study you linked just reinforces the former but does nothing to disprove the latter.

Look, if you want to debate your theory of contagious trans-ness, you should be open about that from the get-go.

What are you going on about "contagious trans-ness"? Gender dysphoria isn't spread by a bacterial or viral infection. I have no idea what you mean by "contagious". The second sentence reads like a total non-sequitur.

And how long until the current criteria is outdated?

> Overall, 33% underwent transmasculine procedures and 67% transfemenine procedures. The prevalence of regret among patients undergoing transmasculine and transfemenine surgeries was <1% (IC <1%–<1%) and 1% (CI <1%–2%), respectively.

That's less than the regret rate for life saving surgeries lol

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8099405/

(1) by transition i mean socially transition and go on puberty blockers if they want them.

When patients are given puberty blockers, desistence rates are miniscule, in the single digits. Proponents of hormonal intervention insist that this is proof that doctors are selecting kids that would persist in a cross sex gender absent blockers. But that's hard to reconcile with psychologists previous failures to predict persistence. While they're billed as giving "time to think", it's pretty much impossible to deny that blockers are causing patients who would have desisted in their cross sex gender identity if they went through their natal puberty.

It's not just conservative American States that are changing course on blockers for children: Finland, Sweden, the UK, Italy, Denmark, and Norway have all stopped prescription of blockers in children. Plenty of other countries never allowed it in the first place.

If you ask trans people, "it's too late to live as my gender" is a common sentiment. You even see it in the gay community, where gay/bi people who come to acceptance of their sexualities late in life, feel like it's "too late" to live with that identity, and choose to continue to live and identify as straight people.

Hence the option for puberty blockers.

Turns out trans people will opt to go through the puberty that matches their gender if the opportunity arises, just as more people come out gay/bi/etc at an earlier age now that the opportunity arose.

Same thing with gay people, as per your example. I'm sure some do remain closeted their entire lives. But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.

Plenty do, but the ones that don't give credence to the idea that forced closeting as a teenager makes it harder to follow your heart later. And that's in a situation where it doesn't get more difficult to come out later (if you're not married). Transitioning pre- and post- puberty is very different with current medical technology, so a lot more people will get "stuck".

> But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.

Some do, but statistics show that the majority don't. At some point it stops making sense to identify as a gay/bi person if you've been married for 20 years and have no intention of leaving. That ship has sailed, so to speak. The same thing happens with trans people for very practical and biological reasons post-puberty.

Well, yeah. That's because it literally was a passing phase that the child experienced. That's why there's so many studies (some of them linked in this thread) showing that if you simply defer the decision until the minor is a major , the majority of gender dysphoria desists.

IOW, once the child has actually matured a little, their identity confusion goes away.

Deferring is the path of least harm; is it any wonder then that most of the people in the world, including highly secular countries, go that route?

There's a reason there's nearly 10x as many gay identifying people in recent generations compared to past, and you can't generalize it as being a "phase". The true rates are likely the same, but people who identify that way dip off as you go back generations.

You notice the same pattern with left-handedness and those who identify as left-handed over time.

Left handedness increased from about 5% to 12% over the span of more than 60 years: https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/history-of-left-handedness

By comparison rates of transgender identification among minors has increased by a factor of a hundred over the span of just 10 years: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rates-of-newly-recorded-...

We're talking about an increases that are multiple orders of magnitude greater, over a fraction of the time span.

That is an extremely generous interpretation. I think you're giving way too much credit to the average person that uses that argument.

Also I really have to wonder how much of that desistance is giving up versus actually being satisfied.

I feel like as a society we put trans people in a situation where it is controversial for them to transition as children, but also controversial for them to transition as adults. (The notion of a man in a dress no longer exists if the man never had male puberty, but not only is it controversial for such a boy to never have male puberty, we villainize the now-man's attempts to become a woman!) But then we say that outcomes for trans people are bad so them staying in the closet is good. Which is weird, because the cause of the bad outcomes is that there is no stage of their life where trans people can transition noncontroversially.

Higher rates of suicidality: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7011156/

~4x the rate of depression: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Even if these disparities are due to discrimination, those disparities still exist. We don't measure health outcomes based on what hypothetically would happen in an ideal world where people genuinely do not recognize or distinguish between the sexes. We measure health outcomes based on what happens in real world.

You will say "but then you were not a desister" but I would be counted as one, just like the other kids in my position.

I wonder how many left handed people were beaten into becoming right handed, and remained right handed. In a society where left handed people continue to be beaten, would these people be considered happily right handed since they continue to use their right hand? How would we be able to tell?

I wonder if we existed in a world where soft boys were beaten into becoming less emotional, who grow up to be unemotional men. In a society where adult men are beaten if they express softness, are these men considered happily unemotional? How would we be able to tell?

How do we tell if someone is cis when it is stigmatized to be trans or express gender dysphoria? Genuinely not sure, honestly.

This is why talking about what the outcomes would be in some hypothetical world is pointless. Doctors are striving to deliver the best outcomes in the real world, not the outcomes in some hypothetical world that doesn't actually exist and probably never will.

> yet also use the discrimination against trans people as a justification to discriminate against children exploring gender, i.e. trans children.

Children are free to explore their gender. Just not with powerful drugs that have lifelong effects. Refusing to prescribe puberty blockers to a child experiencing gender dysphoria isn't discrimination any more than it is to refuse to prescribe artificial testosterone to a boy that has normal levels of testosterone for his age. We "discriminate" against this boy that wants to explore hypermasculinity, too.

> I wonder if we existed in a world where soft boys were beaten into becoming less emotional, who grow up to be unemotional men. In a society where adult men are beaten if they express softness, are these men considered happily unemotional? How would we be able to tell?

You would measure their health outcomes: do the latter experience depression or other negative mental health conditions at different rates? Do they die by suicide at different rates? I haven't dug deeply into the effects of corporal punishment, but presumably it's discouraged because we've observed negative outcomes.

> How do we tell if someone is cis when it is stigmatized to be trans or express gender dysphoria? Genuinely not sure, honestly.

I'm not sure what you mean by "how do we tell if someone is cis". I think you mean something along the lines of "how do we tell which gender dysphoric children will or won't continue to experience dysphoria in their cis gender past natal puberty?" If that's the case then the answer is "we can't". Psychologists tried, for decades, and failed to predict the minority of patients that would persist in cross sex gender identity. We know that ~80% become comfortable in their cis gender after natural puberty. This is why it's hard to justify prescribing puberty blockers. Suppressing natal puberty will help someone pass better in a cross-sex gender, but the benefits of passing better need to be weighted against the probability that the child would live comfortably in their cis gender without dysphoria absent blockers.

Which is the better health outcome? 5 trans people who medically transitioned before puberty, or 4 cis people who live comfortably without dysphoria in their cis gender and 1 trans person who transitioned after natal puberty? Ideally we'd be able to predict the 1 patient that would persist, and transition them medically before puberty. But again, we don't have that ability. Thus, it's insufficient to justify prescription of puberty blockers by pointing to the one trans person who medically transitioned as an adult and say that they would have had a better live if they were able to transition medically before puberty. This is the big reason why advocates for puberty blockers tend to dislike discussion of persistent rates with versus without puberty blockers. It's fairly easy to justify them in the simplistic world where all gender dysphoric youth are guaranteed to persist. But factor in the persistence rates without blockers and it becomes vastly harder to make the case for them.

Coulda said the same about homosexuality ~30 years ago. It’s a bad reason then, it’s a bad reason now.

> You are counting kids with GNC behavior who never talked about transitioning themselves stopping said GNC behavior.

These children met the criteria for GID in the contemporary iteration of the DSM. The author of the study I linked would go on to write the criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM-V. The idea that we'd see a substantially different rate of desistence if the DSM-V was used is not likely: the author of the study has stated that most of the children would have met the criteria for gender dysphoria under the DSM-V.

> You are also counting kids who end up repressing (some of which end up transitioning with worse outcomes years down the line)

The study followed up with patients for an average of over 10 years. Do you have any actual evidence that a significant portion of desisters in this study transitioned later in life? Or are you just stating this without evidence?

People have not offered a good explanation why these rates of desistence are false. They either insist that the criteria used was wrong, or baselessly claim that desisters are just repressing desire to transition.

Puberty blockers are a huge step. Not one taken lightly. Kids who are unsure, by and large don’t take that step.

I injured my wrist a few years back. Doctors offered me pt or surgery + pt. They clearly advised me that given the low severity of my injury, surgery would likely improve some things while causing other impacts. I declined the surgery.

This is how most medical choices are made. Doctor advises, patient listens and choses best option. For patients who are also minors - their parents are also involved. Every day a parent and child choose between consequences of the intervention and consequences of non intervention. The only difference with trans kids is apparently you and the gov want a say in the choice. It’s not your body, nor your kid. It’s none of your business.

Well, first off - we trust children to make life-altering decisions every day - sometimes without good access to info about potential downsides. A great example is sports. Many sports (ballet, football) can and do have life-long health and quality of life impacts. Minors can commit to those and yet there’s no widespread moral panic about it.

The thing is I actually do trust children to figure out what’s best for themselves. Children are impulsive, yes - they have poor in-the-moment judgement. But medical transition isn’t something that can be done impulsively. It takes years of consistent action, not minutes or hours.

> Do you have any actual evidence that a significant portion of desisters in this study transitioned later in life?

I don't have enough funds to perform such a research, maybe there exists such a paper but I have not looked for it. In general trans topics are woefully underfunded. But I know enough people that ended up desisting either due to conversion therapy or due to shame and lack of support from their family, and transitioned years afterwards (5-15+ years) after living shitty and depressing empty lives pretending to be cis.

> But I know enough people that ended up desisting either due to conversion therapy or due to shame and lack of support from their family, and transitioned years afterwards (5-15+ years) after living shitty and depressing empty lives pretending to be cis.

This is called "anecdote". As I said, the claim that a sizeable chunk of desisters transition later in life is being made without evidence.

And again, with a mean followup time of over 10 years, most of the people who transitioned 5-15 years later would be counted as persisters, not desisters.

> This is called "anecdote"

When you are lacking proper research all you are going to get are anecdotes. Let's not put our heads in the sand.

> with a mean followup time of over 10 years, most of the people who transitioned 5-15 years later would be counted as persisters, not desisters.

10-15 years means that you are 25-30 if you came out at 15. At that point people often self-medicate with hrt and nobody ends up knowing. The mean age of 10 years is because they tracked younger children, if you came out at 7 its unlikely that you will transition at 17 with unsupportive parents, especially back then.

Of course not. There is an assessment period. They are assessed for gender dysphoria, and if diagnosed they may be prescribed puberty blockers to treat their gender dysphoria. And what is the criteria for diagnosing a patient with gender dysphoria? Whether or not you think the criteria in the DSM are effective, at the end of the day these are the criteria that would be used to approve puberty blockers. If you think these criteria erroneously include kids who aren't "trans kids" then we're approving puberty blockers for patients who aren't "trans kids".

Of course a longer follow up time is strictly better, but it's not valid to simply fill in a gap in data with whatever better suits your worldview. If a study measuring rates of detransition follows up with patients for 10 years, then patients that detransition after 10 years would not be counted. Is it valid to point to a couple anecdotes of detransition, and then claim that the study's finding are false because there's loads of people who detransitioned after 10 years? Of course not. But that's the same flawed criticism you're making here.

Why the scarequotes? For the record I don't think I have used these two words together, but I obviously do think that kids can be trans just like anyone else, is that even debatable?

> don't get prescribed blockers

I am quoting here out of context but correct, there is no point in puberty blockers before the "natural" puberty.

> There is an assessment period. They are assessed for gender dysphoria, and if diagnosed they may be prescribed puberty blockers to treat their gender dysphoria

Sure, and we have been saying that these criteria are unscientific, inaccurate, and based on social stereotype.

> at the end of the day these are the criteria that would be used to approve puberty blockers

The difference being that teenagers who don't explicitly seek them because they don't consider themselves as trans are never considered for undergoing puberty blockers. All that study shows is what we have been saying all the time about the DSM.

> If you think these criteria erroneously include kids who aren't "trans kids" then we're approving puberty blockers for patients who aren't "trans kids".

No, because teenagers who don't consider themselves trans do not seek puberty blockers and are therefore never considered for them. The main distinguisher between trans and nontrans people is their self identification.

> Of course a longer follow up time is strictly better, but it's not valid to simply fill in a gap in data with whatever better suits your worldview. There certainly seems to be a pattern.

I don't think it's surprising or debatable that trans people who undergo conversion therapy or grow up in oppressive/conservative environments often end up repressing.

1. Expressed a cross-sex gender identity. They were trans kids, as you choose to term it.

2. Met the assessment criteria that would be used to approve a patient for blockers.

Yes, the desisters in the study would most likely be prescribed blockers if they went to a gender clinic that prioritized affirmation.

> The difference being that teenagers who don't explicitly seek them because they don't consider themselves as trans are never considered for undergoing puberty blockers

Again, these patients did express a cross-sex gender identity, or "consider themselves as trans" to use your language. If they never did, then they can't desist from a cross sex gender identity if they never expressed one in the first place.

> No, because teenagers who don't consider themselves trans do not seek puberty blockers and are therefore never considered for them. The main distinguisher between trans and nontrans people is their self identification.

To re-use your terminology, studies found that ~80% of the children who considered themselves trans stop considering themselves trans and become comfortable and no longer experience gender dysphoria in their cis gender after natal puberty. It seems like the root of the problem is the lack of understanding that the children in the study did "consider themselves trans", as you choose to put it.

If all you're going to do is continue to erroneously claim that the patients in this study weren't expressing a cross sex gender identity ("consider themselves trans"), or baselessly claim that the desisters are actually just repressing a trans identity then there's no value in continuing this.

I am talking about d6e

In the UK, Canada, most of the rest of the world? Single payer public health systems mean trans healthcare isn’t more profitable than any other type of health care. Doctors have no profit incentive, as there are easier less controversial specialities that have larger patient bases and higher patient thru-put.

Well there was never going to be a perfect solution, right? So a solution that results in the most number of satisfied adults is an okay goal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44546443

You sound surprised, so maybe you really don't know this: this state of affairs is how it's always been, and is likely to continue well into the future.

The government regulates all medicines, all medical procedures, and all medical practices.

It's literally one of the many jobs of government.

Right.

> Many times rights of the minority have been ruled to be important, as in cases like abortion.

Correct, but it was with the agreement of the majority of voters! IOW, the majority opinion still prevailed.

We are not talking about tyranny of the minority by the majority; your example is literally the majority agreeing that those specific minorities rights be granted to them.

TBH, the opposition that we are seeing is opposition to medical intervention on minors who by definition alone cannot give informed consent.

Stop fighting that battle and I guarantee that this entire "issue" turns into a nothing-burger.

There is no reason to argue for medical interventions on someone who is unable to consent.

On objective metrics, certainly. Never on subjective metrics.

Kid got a broken leg? Sure, doctors can intervene, often without even parental involvement (Emergencies, for example).

Kid feels like they have a broken leg? The doctor that cuts up that kid without doing any scans and working simply off the kid's self-reported feelings is going to be out of practice very very quickly.

Hell, doctors won't even prescribe antibiotics based off a kid's self-reported feelings; they'll confirm with a number of objective metrics (presence/absence of mucous in mouth/lungs, body temperature, pulse, etc).

So, no, we don't allow doctors to perform any procedures on children with only self-reported feelings as "evidence"[1].

[1] With the exception being male genital mutilation at birth, which is something I've always been vocally against.

Before engaging in what could be a huge discussion here, I suggest you do some quick searching about legal risks of performing life-saving abortion procedures, gender-affirming care for prison inmates, and workplaces choosing whether the health insurance they provide employees covers gender-affirming care as starting points to learn about the sad state of affairs.

The grandparent post didn't say "transgender treatments" they said "transgender issues."

Do you believe that the mere concept of questioning your gender identity or expression is something that should be kept from the minds of minors?

You don't think that transgender treatments is a transgender issue? If you think it is then my response is perfectly on-topic.

> Do you believe that the mere concept of questioning your gender identity or expression is something that should be kept from the minds of minors?

Depending on your jurisdiction, there are messages you can't target to kids. Why should there be a special exemption for this?

Besides, my belief on this is irrelevant; the only transgender issue that has gotten pushback en-masse from the clear majority of people world wide has been transgender treatments on minors.

IOW, this (treatment for persons unable to give informed consent) is a very unpopular position.

And calling the actual problem gets derision and hatred. Or on HN, -1s

The problem is Judeo-christian ideas of circumcision. Its 100% archaic male infant torture cause some bronze-age book says so.

Consent has never been for those under 18. They're just slaves of their parental owners. (No seriously, look at how laws are crafted in the USA. They are effectively slaves unless a judge deems it elsewise.)

The most impactful benefit of circumcision is the lower cervical cancer incidence. As evidenced by the lower rates in the US despite the much poorer healthcare than in European countries, particularly the Nordics that choose not to embrace science and advocate for circumcision.

Would you mind citing some of the research supporting that it’s a good idea to take a knife to a baby’s penis? (Sometimes it feels like the word "circumcision" is a nice way to sidestep the implications.)

It seems strange to blame infant penises for higher cancer rates, but if there’s science to support the claim, it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

On the other hand, perhaps a higher cancer rate would be worth it. The question is, how much higher?

First,

> In medicine, an indication is a valid reason to use a certain test, medication, procedure, or surgery.

From https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2128632/ ,

> What are the absolute medical indications for circumcision?

> Medical indications […] occur in 1.5% and 1% of boys respectively.

That is, the overwhelming majority (>98%) of circumcisions in the US are not done for medical reasons. As the article states,

> Nearly all circumcisions are carried out for cultural or religious reasons.

Lastly, this:

> The most impactful benefit of circumcision is the lower cervical cancer incidence.

Is an illogical argument for circumcision as it is being discussed here, at birth.

> It seems strange to blame infant penises for higher cancer rates, but if there’s science to support the claim, it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

… the claim is absurd. There's no science to support it.

The argument as raised above stands: why is circumcision — done at birth and without the consent of the patient — permissible, but puberty blockers — done far closer to adulthood and with the consent of the patient — are impermissible?

Because we make a lot of medical decisions for children and this one is extremely minor with wide raining results.

The same paper you linked showed multiple pathologies that are significantly reduced by circumcision including penile cancer and HIV. That paper also cuts off at 1999. More recent studies show even greater effects.

> the claim is absurd. There's no science to support it.

No it's not, compare the rate of cervical cancer in countries with and without circumcision. It's considerably higher in countries where the majority of males are uncircumcised, even when those countries have higher vaccination rates and better overall health care.

I'm not sure what my personal opinion is on the topic, since I'm principally against infant circumcision. But I have less problems with puberty blockers, since it can still be reversed once a person is old enough to give consent.

I used to have a problem with that idea too, until someone pointed out that puberty is an irreversible process with major consequences. The fact that everyone goes through it is a bit irrelevant; if it was happening to someone over 18, puberty blockers wouldn’t even be controversial.

As a parent, what to do? I look at my 2yo daughter and wonder if I’ll have to support her in a decision like that one day, or go against her wishes just because she’s 11. If there’s research indicating that delaying puberty doesn’t have major long term harm, then I’m more likely to endorse puberty blockers.

The fact is trans people are a tiny minority who are abused for political gain. I don't have hard numbers but it's probably not an exaggeration to say that to grant or withhold puberty blockers is probably no more common than a smorgasbord of other agonising medical decisions you may have to make.

Personally I don't like the idea of puberty blockers but if my 7 year old decided tomorrow that she was a boy, and lived that as authentically as they were able for years, then I think long and hard about it.

There are no studies on this Bec doing such studies is considered grossly unethical and evil, same as studying brain lobotomies in infants. As such we have no science on this, there are just people who have decided one thing and are performing live experiments without any controls. However, it should be noted that until very recently there was no significant incidence of unexplained child suicide, there was no significant incidence of unexplained teenage suicide, nor was there a significant incidence of unexplained young adult suicide. This is 100% social contagion, exacerbated by evil greedy pharmaceutical orgs who have latched on to small childhood insecurities and used them to build a multi-billion dollar industry mutilating and disfiguring healthy people.

That sword cuts both ways: if the reasoning for banning infant male circumcision is "they can always do it as an adult", then that's a perfectly good reason for doing it with puberty blockers too.

I've always been against infant circumcision. Why would I extend that exception to be broader? I'd rather narrow the number of things we can do to children, not expand them.

You can't block puberty as an adult. Most people are already past puberty once they turn 18.

"You can always transition as an adult" is that other edge, not "you can always block puberty as an adult".

Interesting, I would like to see that evidence. Specially when compared with the vaccination against HPV. Because, as far as I'm aware, that's by far the best way to prevent cervical cancer.

Luckily, as you've said, we already have HPV vaccines, so maybe it's time to stop cutting off pieces from little boys' penises?

- You can also decide to cauterize the nailbeds on your toes to get lifelong protection against ingrown toenails.

- You can preemptively put metal crowns over all your teeth to protect them from tooth decay - metals are stronger than enamel!

- You can also remove all your body hair with laser treatments, to get protection from ingrown hairs - those can get badly infected!

- You can also tattoo your blood type on your chest, like they did in the SS, to save precious time in case you need blood transfusion while unconscious.

You can do all of these things to yourself, as an adult with informed consent. But don't do it to infants.

The trouble about laws involving children is that you’re up against every parent who has a child. By default they’ll err on protection, because our biology says that’s the safest thing to do. But as you say, that’s not always the best approach.

Male circumcision is an interesting one. The correct thing to do isn’t to say "here’s an example of something screwed up" as a way to justify something else; instead, ban the screwed up thing.

Personally, I hope it’ll be banned one day. I once asked my dad whether I was circumcised. He laughed and said haven’t you looked? I still have no idea whether I am. Now I’d rather not know.

So slavery has taken MANY forms throughout history - the form most people are familiar with is american chattel slavery “a form of slavery where individuals are treated as personal property and can be bought, sold, or owned indefinitely”. There are lots of other forms of slavery many that don’t including purchasing humans, and the US prison labour system is slavery beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Why beyond the shadow of a doubt? Because the 13th amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

Also, since the US prison system allows prison labour to be sold to private corporations, you can actually buy a prisoner’s forced labour.

Now, you're probably confusing chattel slavery as the only form of slavery, of which you buy and sell humans as property. There are other types, now predominantly slavery by the state (as punishment of a crime).

As for children, it definitely looks like a slave-owner type arrangement.

If you REALLY don't want to know, it might be best to remove this comment, in case somebody decides to grief you.

Right, and my argument is "We should stop things like that" while your argument is "we should do more things like that".

Which sounds more reasonable to you?

Because the idea that the only acceptable gender norms a kid is allowed to be exposed to and express is the one tied to their genes is frankly a ridiculous concept.

There's nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls. If you don't believe that harmless message should reach the ears of kids, then why? What is in that sort of message that you're afraid of?

I fully agree there's nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls

I think the idea that a boy wearing dresses and playing with dolls must automatically be trans is actually very harmful and I do oppose that message reaching anyone

Gender identity and gender expression is something that is very personal to the individual. It's not up to you, me, or anybody else to label them - boy, girl, non-binary, whatever.

So I'll ask you the same question. Do you believe that the mere concept of questioning your gender identity or expression is something that should be kept from the minds of minors?

Not at all

I just think that the clothes you choose to wear shouldn't have anything to do with gender identity

They may be related because it might relate to how you choose to express your gender

But the fact is that clothes are clothes, not genders

Then ultimately you and I agree on the main crux of this conversation, the part that actually matters.

I'm vehemently against the "transing" of anyone who exhibits behavior or preferences that are outside of cultural norms for their biological sex

They might be trans, yes. But they might not. I'm very very very against putting people in the trans category when they shouldn't be

You and I are on the exact same page. If you still don't think so, please make the distinction clear.

A more honest example would be something like “children with a male anatomy might actually be girls, depending not on physical but rather on psychological characteristics (i.e. ‘gender identity’)”. That’s a completely different claim, and one that fewer people would agree with, so your post is more or less a motte and bailey.

Your line questioning is sort of revealing that this only points you are wishing to score. I have, after all, not taken a position on targeted messages at children (I only pointed out that there are still restrictions on messages targeted to children).

I have already clarified that the specific contentious "transgender issue" is "transgender treatment", and that the clear majority of people all over the world are opposed to that specific "transgender issue".

I have not taken any position on whether or not children should be targeted with messages across the spectrum, ranging from the extreme on one end "It's okay for boys to play with dolls", to the extreme on the other "You will be happier after castration".

The reason I have not taken any position on messages is because of the many times proponents use the former as examples of what the rules should allow while ignoring that the rule they are championing also allows the latter message.

My position on the messages that children are to hear will always depend on the specific message. This is because children (even some young adults to, TBH) are impressionable!

If I had adopted your method of arguing for/against a point, I would have asked "Why are you so afraid of having your access to children cut off?" but I did not. Since you appear to be arguing your point in bad faith, I'm just going to go ahead and ask it.

If you had any faith that your message was the correct one you wouldn't be on the internet arguing for access to other people's children.

Why are you so afraid of having the easily impressionable in society prevented from seeing your message? Are you really afraid that if you don't get to imprint them with your message at the correct age they might never buy it as an adult?

Mere gender non-conformity isn't enough for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, despite what you're claiming. These are the DSM criteria for diagnosis of gender dysphoria in children:

---

A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months’ duration, as manifested by at least six of the following (one of which must be Criterion A1):

1. A strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that one is the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).

2. In boys (assigned gender), a strong preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong preference for wearing only typical masculine clothing and a strong resistance to the wearing of typical feminine clothing.

3. A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play.

4. A strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender.

5. A strong preference for playmates of the other gender.

6. In boys (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble play; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically feminine toys, games, and activities.

7. A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy.

8. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender.

B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, school, or other important areas of functioning.

---

> If you had any faith that your message was the correct one you wouldn't be on the internet arguing for access to other people's children.

Classy as ever implying that trans people are grooming children to be trans.

It seems like the opposite happens to me: parents with attitudes like yours will attempt to keep the existence of trans people secret in an attempt to groom their child to be cis, but if their child is gender dysphoric, it's not going to work and they're just going to suffer worse dysphoria-induced distress during puberty and transition as adults.

Instead, I only offer a gentile reminder of the Hacker News guidelines, along with a genuine wish that you are having a fulfilling day. :)

Which... the VISA-Mastercard duopoly, backed by American soft power and with an American moral compass, already rather proves that point for anyone that's ever tried to pay for erotica outside the mainstream

I asked because I wanted to get a sense on if he conflating the two by accident, or if it was an attempt to steer the conversation away from free speech concerns.

Visa and MasterCard disallow content depicting CSA, rape, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, scatological erotica, torture, extreme sexual violence, and revenge porn.

Because you're not wrong, the mainstream is fairly narrow, but to say the credit card duopoly excludes only the most heinous and vile imagery that can only barely be covered under "artistic expression" isn't exactly an entirely accurate depiction of reality.

No more fucking filthy geeks!

No more neckbeards or incels!

All you guys just really smell!

Yaaay progress!

Once a significant part of said society can't (or won't) differentiate sexual education and intimacy from pornography, I don't think your statement holds true anymore.

On the surface it seems reasonable to ask for an equivalent ID check online.

But. The bouncer doesn't photocopy my ID and store it in a poorly secured back room that is regularly raided by criminal enterprises or outright sold by unscrupulous owners of the establishment. Similarly, they don't check in with the government in a manner that leaves a record.

I'm fine with an ID check, but I think it is also reasonable to demand the same level of privacy that one gets when visiting a bar, casino, burlesque club, or similar establishment.

It simply means that it has not arrived in your vicinity yet. In Sydney (Australia, not Canada), whilst most venues are satisfied with quick visual checks of one's face / ID for anyone who looks young, some venues have equipped the bouncers with iPads that run an app dedicated to taking one's face picture and recording the government issued ID details (driver licence number, residential address and particulars – all of them! or no entry). I have had an argument with them a couple of times where the bouncers refused to say – and pretty aggressiveley so – how the PII is handled, who will own it after handing it over, and how to delete it. I simply walked away each and every time, and I no longer approach the venues that record the ID details.

Frankly, the erosion of privacy in western countries is reaching epic proportions, with incumbent governments making substantial efforts to get into one's colon against the citizen's wish.

These digital checks, if done "right". Are cheap to implement, and hard to get around. They don't easily let adults allow a kid to do it anyway. And a government can trivially check if a whole swath of businesses is implementating it.

That last point makes it very easy for governments to use this for widespread ideological interventions. With very little option for others to push back, because few people are involved in enforcement.

Which society though? It used to be that political decisionmaking understood and accepted the existence of people not like the voting majority, and work to a common consensus… that's rather eroded now, and not just in the USA.

> Obviously, there should be limits.

Obviously? The only thing I'd accept as "obvious" in terms of speech limits is that which is actively violating people, e.g. CSAM, revenge porn and doxxing.

Raunchy stories? Porn with consenting participants? Fictional horror & gore? Those are not "obvious" limits…

…and then consider nude selfies exchanged consensually between 15yo teens. Is that CSAM?

Seriously, isn't this sort of par for the course? We've always regulated what minors can access on the internet. Facebook didnt even formally allow children on their site (I don't know if that's still the case). I think it's a much larger issue that we haven't been enforcing those rules, since we apparently think they are a good idea.

The current administration has collected nearly all the pieces of Exodia to be able to legally criminalize homosexuality and transgenderism without ever writing a law that says those exact words and have it be held up as constitutional. I'd say it was clever if it wasn't awful.

We'll be about a quarter of the way to the Chinese Internet by 2029.

With all due respect this comes across as mysoginic and ageist. It is also quite unnecessary to your point. Especially because middle aged women aren't the most powerful lobby in the US by any stretch.

I should have quoted a longer part of that message for better clarity. I incorrectly assumed that my full comment was enough to contextualise what I meant.

Plenty of people have been arrested for importing things legal in Japan that are illegal in the West.

Plenty of countries have laws on the books that make it a felony to even look at what's on the average Japanese store bookshelf while you're in Japan.

Why should the laws be different just because you're moving electrons instead of atoms?

You aren't going to stop teenagers from watching porn if you have the internet.

All this would do is change the websites that teenagers are using.

It strikes me as just political grandstanding since the people putting forth this idea must know it is completely pointless.

Not to mention, a website is vastly different than a physical store.

They won't have to, most websites will use 3rd party age verification. This is basically what Doordash and Uber Eats use to verify your age before delivering alcohol or THC to your apartment.

Rife for abuse? Absolutely. Will these databases get leaked and increase the chances of your identity getting stolen? Yes. But isn't a small increase to an already-existing problem.

I have accepted door dash as a non-door dash customer. They check for ID. Just like the store.

> There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.

Then everyone will just follow a YouTube tutorial to reinstall their operating system and bypass restrictions. There were TikTok videos teaching kids how to steal cars, would there not be easy to follow instructions to bypass whatever client side filtering is implemented?

I get where you're coming from, but mandated client side filtering has been tried and has been ridiculed as a complete failure every time. Attempts have been made to market and provide filtering products to parents with little effect, with them either being easy to bypass or difficult to use.

It's actually kind of interesting to see the people who were fighting against client side filtering are now advocating for it, because server side restrictions are the next logical step.

I’m hearing more and more how younger generations don’t have what people used to call basic computer skills, because everything just kind of works now. Putting up some road blocks that require research and hands on tinkering to solve, is an invaluable part of the learning process.

One could say the same of server/cloud obstacles, but because those systems are afar and opaque, it's easy to be content copy-pasting scripts. And there is less sense of progression and ownership since it doesn't involve building up your own environment.

This might be the least bad option. If it prevents server side enforcement, then settling on government enforcement of the commercial status quo might be less bad.

And what you describe is already the case for almost all devices anyway. The commercial incentives are there. And sadly, from a security PoV it is also quite valuable.

I mean, they are. But I've never seen a similar reaction on HN or any forum when social media require age verification. Actually, I think most HN users would cheer if the government required Facebook to only allow users over 18.

I feel the general opinion about something on the internet basically comes down to this simple rule: !(do American Christians want that thing?), no matter what that thing is.

It’s the ambulance chaser section of the article that explains the problem.

American Christians can and should rely on content blockers rather than lawsuits.

Just because someone can argue better than you can does not mean they are right. Climate change deniers can be very convincing if you don't understand physics.

*Also, I can’t wait for the first lawsuit over a breastfeeding page, because you know it’s coming.

The blog owner doesn't need to implement an ID check, the browser or OS just needs to tap into a service that has checked ID

No there doesn't. Why is the burden on ME (as a site owner) to do literally anything at all? The burden should be on parents to control their childrens' Internet use. Install a robust content blocker or don't give them Internet access.

Am I, a site owner, supposed to work with every asinine state and national system for making this attestation system work? How do I know the person behind the keyboard is actually the person whose age is being verified (and not one of their parents')? And as a citizen and consumer, why do I have to go out of my way to get some kind of digital identification that proves my age?

Why does this have to stop at porn? The logical next step is that legislators and parents will demand that sites will block folks from accessing blasphemous content. Or that you need to prove that you're not a resident of a particular state in order to access medical facts about abortion (because if you're looking it up, you obviously intend to get one or help someone get one)?

I don't want people to know how old I am or am not. Or where I live or don't live, or my sexual orientation, or anything else about me. I don't want to have to know any of these things about people who visit my website. And frankly, the idea that I am the one who is responsible for this and not the extreme minority of folks who want to keep certain content away from their kids or whatever is wild.

- ID must be verified either by matching a photo of the user to their photo ID, or by processing private transactional data (i.e. a credit card transaction).

- The user must verify their ID at the start of the session, and every hour the session is active.

- Historical anonymized ID verification data must be retained for at least 7 years.

- Anyone running a site that's viewable in Tennessee without the above ID verification rules is committing a class C felony, regardless of what state they reside in or host their site in.

This is clearly an attempt to stop any content they label as "obscene" (using a very broad definition of "obscenity") from being viewable at all in Tennessee. It's a completely unreasonable set of hoops to jump through that solely exists as a fig leaf because they know that making a law banning the content entirely would be ruled unconstitutional.

The answer is because we live in a society. Society is about families, not just adults. Sure, raising kids is primarily the job of the parents, but everyone helps. Sometimes that results in a bit of inconvenience for businesses.

Excluding kids from businesses that are adult-only isn't very kid-friendly, but it's the bare minimum when there are children around.

This limits the restrictions to those with incredibly broad support. Keeping a lot of agency with families on how to raise their children.

Digital age verification, if implemented well, is easy to enact, and hard to sabotage without being noticed. That enables restrictions that 49% of people disagree with. Heck, it enables restrictions that 49% of Congress disagrees with. That could be 60% of people disagreeing.

The enforcement here is quite twisted: it attracts greedy litigants. Lying is bad, but greed is a mortal sin.

(1) Without addressing the general statement, specifically this isn't new. You’ve historically not been allowed to buy pornography or cigarettes or alcohol without age verification or watch obscene content between the nightly news runs. I don't see this specifically as parents wanting the government to raise their kids at all. It’s people without any other real options wanting to make it more difficult for inappropriate material to end up in the hands of minors. When I was 12 I remember getting online with AOL discs and having popups with porn appear in front of me as I’m playing neopets, because some unsavory ad got accidentally “clicked” many sessions ago. How can a parent “parent” that?

> If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should)

(2) These laws already exist, the internet was a loophole. If it’s done right you verify your age when you make your account and the site doesn’t bug you again. Not sure how frequently you’re visiting new porn sites, but I can’t imagine getting over prompted would be a real problem.

(3) There is a concept of using ZKPs to do more things client side. However I think currently people are more excited about selective disclosure. You just give the site a signed claim that you’re over 18 and that’s all they know. It’s more private than handing over your DL at the grocery store checkout.

> People should also be able to set their browser/computer to auto-send this for single-user devices, where it is all transparent to the user.

They should, shouldn’t they. But some privacy nut out there will say we can’t have nice things because an advertiser might use it to profile you.

Really though one aspect of digital identity is presence and liveliness checking. The states that issue your ID to Apple Wallet are only willing to do so because Apple ensures that the user presence is verified at time of use.

The question isn’t why should you have to jump through hoops, it’s why should we enforce age restrictions in person but not in the internet—why haven't you had to jump through all the existing hoops to watch internet porn until now?

2+3. A simple cookie with a birth year ought to work. Why should every site worry about South Dakota’s definitions when checking a cookie seems reasonable effort. Circumvention of that is already fraud.

A cookie with a birth year is not a cryptographic verification of a digital identity document. Anybody can click “I’m over 18”.

Sure. A government issued certificate that is required to get an IP and be able to navigate the internet. How does that f-+-ing sound?

sounds like the solution to me. disallow under 18s from internet access. any parent who allows an underage to browse the internet unsupervised should be penalized to the same degree that they would if they directly provided hardcore pornography to the child, because thats exactly what it is.

I personally would choose this route, handing kids fully internet enabled pornography consumption devices is beyond ridiculous, and the size factor of smartphones (take them everywhere, camera connected directly to encrypted chats with strangers) well the fact that the government even allows this is simply a matter of confusion to my small mind.

What am I missing here? Why do we allow children internet access?

No more filthy fucking geeks!

No more neckbeards or incels!

All you guys just really smell!

Yaaay progress!