Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details. I don’t want to give this data, and websites shouldn’t want to shoulder the responsibility for it.

It seems like this could work much like Apple Pay, just without the payment. A prompt comes up, I use some biometric authentication on my phone, and it sends a signal to the browser that I’m 18+. Apple has been adding state IDs into the Wallet, this seems like it could fall right in line. The same thing could be used for buying alcohol at U-Scan 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. I don’t have kids and no one else’s uses my devices. Why should I need to jump through hoops?

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...

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

It’s a W3C spec led by Okta, Apple and Google based on 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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/

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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?

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

[Citation needed]

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.

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?

“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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Do you see the problem yet?

Sgould I say "Cambridge Analytica" now or later?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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/

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".

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

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

Insurance companies are laughing all the way to the bank.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

The study uses the DSM-III and DSM-IV criteria for gender incongruence disorder, or GID, now referred to as gender dysphoria. The sample ranges from 1989 to 2002 and those were the contemporary iterations of the DSM. The DSM-V wasn't published until 2013. At most the criteria is outdated by one decade, not "several decades". Furthermore, the author of the study would later write the criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM-V. The criteria are not particularly different, and the author of the study I linked has stated in interviews that most of the sample would meet the criteria for gender dysphoria under the DSM-V (which, again, he wrote so this opinion should carry some weight). In short, the idea that if the psychologists had used the DSM-V the results would be substantially different is not likely.

And this isn't just one study that found low rates of persistence:

> In Green (47), the percentage of persisters was 2% (total n = 44; Mean age at follow-up, 19 years; range, 14–24); in Wallien and Cohen-Kettenis (52), the percentage of persisters was 20.3% (total n = 59; Mean age at follow-up, 19.4 years; range, 16–28); and in Steensma et al. (51), the percentage of persisters was 29.1% (total n = 79; Mean age at follow-up, 16.1 years; range, 15–19). Across all studies, the percentage of persisters was 17.4% (total N = 235), with a range from 0 to 29.1%.3

Are all these other studies finding low rates of persistence also tainted in some way?

The study you linked is among a group that were treated with an affirming model of care, where cross sex gender identity is actively encouraged, and a sizeable chunk of the sample were put on puberty blockers. This comports with 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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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

- 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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

(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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This is ideological nonsense.