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US Government wants DNA and social media from visitors
- cebert 9mo agoThat would be a hard pass for me entering any country.
- greggoB 9mo agoI almost want them to pass it through before the FIFA World Cup kicks off in July, and see how that affects visitor numbers. I'd like to think it would absolute tank the event (good, because also fuck FIFA, especially after their "peace prize" bullshit), but honestly I don't have faith in most people to consider this a deal-breaker for them. My parents live in the US, they are aware (and accept) this would be a reason I wouldn't be able to visit them and instead we'd have to meet somewhere else.
- 31337Logic 9mo agoI am just so incredibly sad for the children who will inherit this shit after I'm gone. Who among us is brave enough to try and stop this? I had my free and fun life... hopefully you can have the same.
- therobots927 9mo agoThe bot brigade doesn’t tolerate such thoughts. Think more carefully next time about how your words reflect on the current administration, citizen.
- onetokeoverthe 9mo agotravel without a phone. or use a burner. simple. prints and eyescans in china for 10-15 years now.
- BigTTYGothGF 9mo ago> Who among us is brave enough to try and stop this? Alex Pretti and Renee Good are two that come immediately to mind.
- barbazoo 9mo agoWe have so much power. This is all fundamentally based on this grotesque consumer society and the never ending competition to be better than others. In addition to protesting loudly on the streets, let’s quit the consumer lifestyle. Starve the billionaires. They’ll lose their shit if we just didn’t care about them anymore.
- manuelmoreale 9mo ago> Who among us is brave enough to try and stop this? That could be you. And it would be a great thing to do if you worried for the future generations.
- jerojero 9mo agoI currently go to the USA about once a year to visit friends. If this comes to pass I'll probably not do that anymore.
- greatgib 9mo agoWill all of that, forcing you to install apps to complete the esta and forcing you to install the CBP app to track your movement in and out of US looks totally wide to me.
- gsck 9mo agoDoes the ESTA not already require social media? I recall having to provide stuff like that when I applied for mine a few months back
- grumbelbart2 9mo agoLast time I filled it out it was optional. Nor sure if that changed in the last year.
- circlefavshape 9mo agoI filled one out a few weeks ago, think it was still optional. I just put linkedin
- circlefavshape 9mo ago... though having said that I have a very google-able name so if someone wants to find my facebook profile it's not very difficult
- gsck 9mo agoI put my Linkedin and my Twitter, don't bother with politicking on my Twitter and my LinkedIn is a hollow sad looking profile. Didn't realise it was optional and just put it in. Can't wait to get turned away at the border when flying there in a few months for a new job for liking something years ago.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- oliyoung 9mo agoYes, but it's optional
- brettermeier 9mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- mapt 9mo agoIt's not fascist until we're speaking Italian.
- direwolf20 9mo agoOtherwise it's just sparkling authoritarianism.
- 0xy 9mo agoCanada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK all routinely ask for this and search your devices.
- wasabi991011 9mo agoFalse. I am not sure if you are confused about what the US is attempting to do, or are confused about what other countries are already doing. For Canada's eTA application (equivalent to the US ESTA), there is no social media field, no fields for 10 years of phone numbers, no fields for family member information, no biometrics collection, no "likeness checks" with photos and geolocation, and it can all be done on a website.
- metalman 9mo agoIt's Canada, so it's kind of like walking into a club meeting, nobody is going to say anything overt, but iether you figure things out quickly, or as we say, nature takes it's course, unless you have money, and then the process is optimsed with lots of friendlyness
- therobots927 9mo agoBye bye US tourism industry
- direwolf20 9mo agoIt already went away when they detained tourists for months.
- timbit42 9mo agoThere is a lot of room for it to get a lot worse than it already has.
- blacklion 9mo agoHow easy to persuade officer that you truly don't have any social media accounts?
- direwolf20 9mo agoDepends if they can Google your name or any identifier you gave them and find something. Not just Google, but also their internal tools. They can ask Facebook: is this email address associated with any Facebook account? How about this phone number? Those are two things you need to provide on your visa application.
- blacklion 9mo agoFunny, but my e-mail address IS associated with Facebook account, but it is not my account. My e-mail address is very popular among some demographic who doesn't understand concept of e-mail, and, as a result, associated with tons of accounts on all services which don't check e-mail with code or link. booking.com, for example, but it is only most visible and funny :-)
- everdrive 9mo agoThis is obviously very troubling, but I do wonder what the actual technical mechanisms are for "turning over your social media." Do you .... - Give them your user names and (when possible) the government subpoenas the companies? - Give them your user names and they just see what's publicly available? - Require you to give them your passwords? - Hook your phone up to some device that steals data on the device? - Something else? Does anyone know? I'm also interested in the case where you legitimately don't have social media. Does anyone know what happens then? I understand that can look suspicious, but what if you had to travel to the US unexpectedly? You can't go back in time and build 5 years of social media so you don't look suspicious. (on principle, I wouldn't do this anyway.) [edit] And what if your social media is Chinese and private? They just can't do anything then.
- footy 9mo agoI don't know how it would work for people who can travel visa free, but for people on K-1, F-, M- and J-visas, as well as for people on work visas, you're required to set your social media visibility to public between the time when you apply for the visa and the time when a decision is made on it.
- everdrive 9mo ago>to set your social media visibility to public between the time when you apply for the visa and the time when a decision is made on it. That's absolutely crazy, thanks for sharing. We're entering a pretty dark time here. It's easy to imagine that authorities won't really care if you don't have social media and will just deny you out of convenience. If this gets even more entrenched, then social media gets closer to being a requirement. (and a requirement that is quite a personal detriment)
- sellmesoap 9mo agoTFA says they want a 10 year span of email addresses, so any system they have a back-end adapter for in this Post Snowden show. When every service I use has its own email address, that makes it a pain for me to travel and be truthful on the form. I wonder how their AI deals sarcasm: Entry denied, funny-boy!
- gethly 9mo ago[flagged]
- reorder9695 9mo agoI would worry about them not liking the (true in my case at least) answer of "I don't have social media".
- mywittyname 9mo agoSame. Regular people give me weird looks when I claim not to use social media.
- direwolf20 9mo agoThey wouldn't allow you in, then they'd deport you to Guantanamo Bay for being a terrorist. Probably. I assume.
- RobT7k 9mo agoIsn't your Hackernews account a "Social Media" account? Maybe it is, maybe it's not. We have no idea what the Governments definition of a Social Media Account is.
- barbazoo 9mo agoI would say this is a forum. Is a forum social media?
- iammjm 9mo agoIt is just a matter of time before they will actually mean "anything you've posted on the internet, ever" when they'll say "social media"
- Cornbilly 9mo agoI always assumed "social media" is something tied to your real-life identity. For me, HN would not be social media. But there are people here that give their entire life story in their profile, I would say that, for those people, HN is social media. Though, the Trump regime may see things differently.
- 9mo ago
- sellmesoap 9mo agoThey just need to see your comments and how many stars you have on you *hub.com account.
- josefritzishere 9mo agoThat seems like gross overreach.
- pinkmuffinere 9mo agoIf you showed me the headline without the country, I think my honest best-guesses would have been China, Russia, North Korea, and perhaps Saudi Arabia. That seems bad.
- gradientsrneat 9mo agoThere is US precedence for this, for example IBM. They didn't have cheap genetic testing back then, but they made do with the technology they had.
- penguin_booze 9mo agoThere's nothing new in this. US had always been there, operating at a grand, global scale. The only difference is that its allies wilfully subjugated themselves to the US. Read the book 'Underground Empire'.
- xpe 9mo ago> There's nothing new in this. I would like to request some semblance of nuance. Some awareness of context. At least recognition that differences matter.
- xtiansimon 9mo agoAnd yet, “If approved, this policy would apply to all visitors who currently travel without a visa.”
- oliyoung 9mo agoHeadlines like this are inversely proportional to how cheap flights into the US are right now, it's almost as if no-one wants to travel there.
- timbit42 9mo agoMy country has already cut complete routes into the US due to a lack of demand.
- nitwit005 9mo agoThey specifically ask to make profiles public, which is a terrible idea for a lot of people (stalkers and so forth): > To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.” https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/06/announcement-of-expanded-screening-and-vetting-for-visa-applicants https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
- londons_explore 9mo agoYou presumably also have the option to just delete them
- xboxnolifes 9mo agoI don't think you can presume that. That's basically deleting evidence in this context.
- p0w3n3d 9mo agoThat's crazy. We're already living in 1984 but part II - Big Brother Strikes Back
- pabs3 9mo agoThey were already fingerprinting everyone who entered for decades, this is just more of the same.