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> They would have to disclose all social media identities used in the past five years. > Applicants would also be asked for five years of their telephone numbe

by vinni2 9y ago

> They would have to disclose all social media identities used in the past five years. > Applicants would also be asked for five years of their telephone numbers, email addresses and travel history. I wonder how they would find out if some details are omitted. It is not an easy task to link/resolve people's current online identities let alone past (deleted ones). There is a ton of research centered around this but they are not so effective in practice! I know this because we tried to implement this for a research project on entity resolution.

jaclaz 9y ago
>I wonder how they would find out if some details are omitted. It is not an easy task to link/resolve people's current online identities let alone past (deleted ones). There is a ton of research centered around this but they are not so effective in practice! I know this because we tried to implement this for a research project on entity resolution. I suspect - I may well be wrong of course - that they won't actually check anything on most people/visa requests, BUT they will have a signed legal document where you declare something, and when/if for any reason you will become a target and they will actually look at that, if they can find the omission they will treat it as a false statement and use that to negate the Visa or to prevent future entries to the country or worse.
- tenpies 9y ago
  Agree. It's also worth noting that while they may not have the capability to do much with the information today, they probably will in the future. I could very much see a future where with just a couple of profile names they can reasonably extrapolate which user names you would have selected in the past. Or a quick scan of your current social media content reveals your writing fingerprint and it becomes trivial to tell which accounts/posts were yours with a high degree of confidence.

by vinni2 9y ago

jaclaz 9y ago

>I wonder how they would find out if some details are omitted. It is not an easy task to link/resolve people's current online identities let alone past (deleted ones). There is a ton of research centered around this but they are not so effective in practice! I know this because we tried to implement this for a research project on entity resolution. I suspect - I may well be wrong of course - that they won't actually check anything on most people/visa requests, BUT they will have a signed legal document where you declare something, and when/if for any reason you will become a target and they will actually look at that, if they can find the omission they will treat it as a false statement and use that to negate the Visa or to prevent future entries to the country or worse.

tenpies 9y ago
Agree. It's also worth noting that while they may not have the capability to do much with the information today, they probably will in the future. I could very much see a future where with just a couple of profile names they can reasonably extrapolate which user names you would have selected in the past. Or a quick scan of your current social media content reveals your writing fingerprint and it becomes trivial to tell which accounts/posts were yours with a high degree of confidence.