Visiting the US as a tourist could soon become significantly more onerous under a new plan being mulled by the Trump administration.
According to a Tuesday report in the New York Times, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) this week filed a new proposal that would force visitors to submit up to five years’ worth of social media posts for inspection before being allowed to enter the country.
In addition to social media history, CPB says it plans to ask prospective tourists to provide them with email addresses they’ve used over the last decade, as well as “the names, birth dates, places of residence, and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings, and children.”
The policy would apply even to citizens of countries that have long been US allies, including the UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan, which have long been exempt from visa requirements.
Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Times that the CBP policy would “exacerbate civil liberties harms.”
Cope added that such policies have “not proven effective at finding terrorists and other bad guys” but have instead “chilled the free speech and invaded the privacy of innocent travelers, along with that of their American family, friends and colleagues.”
Journalist Bethany Allen, head of China investigations at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, expressed shock that the US would take such drastic measures to scrutinize the social media posts of tourists.
“Wow,” she wrote in a post on X, “even China doesn’t do this.”
In addition to concerns about civil liberties violations, there are also worries about what the new policy would do to the US tourism industry.
The Times noted in its report that several tourism-dependent businesses last month signed a letter opposing an administration proposal to collect a $250 “visa integrity fee,” and one travel industry official told the paper that the CBP’s new proposal appears to be “a significant escalation in traveler vetting.”
The American tourism industry has already taken a blow during President Donald Trump’s second term, even without a policy of forcing tourists to share their social media history.
A report released on Wednesday from Democrats on the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC) found that US businesses that have long depended on tourism from Canada to stay afloat have been getting hit hard, as Canadian tourists stay away in protest of Trump’s trade war against their country.
Overall, the report found that “the number of passenger vehicles crossing the US-Canada border declined by nearly 20% compared to the same time period in 2024, with some states seeing declines as large as 27%.”
Elizabeth Guerin, owner of New Hampshire-based gift shop Fiddleheads, told the JEC that Canadians used to make up to a quarter of her custom base, but now “I can probably count the number of Canadian visitors on one hand.”
Christa Bowdish, owner of the Vermont-based Old Stagecoach Inn, told the JEC that she feared a long-term loss in Canadian customers, even if Trump ended his feud with the nation tomorrow.
“This is long-lasting damage to a relationship and emotional damage takes time to heal,” she said. “While people aren’t visiting Vermont, they’ll be finding new places to visit, making new memories, building new family traditions, and we will not recapture all of that.”
What happens when you say that you do not use social media?
I hope this will bacfire heavily and shuts down their tourist industry.
I’ve had a few people around me who were to US, or planned to go. All of them has lost all desire to do so. I can’t imagine why would anyone who doesn’t have to (i.e for work, and even then I’d really reconsider it) volunteraly go to US at this point, for a vacation of all things.
When anybody, anywhere in the world visits the US, the IQ goes up in both countries.
And people said I was weird when I said no to real name social networks. Fuck outta here with that noise
Fuck you, Orange Fuck.
Credit: Rachel Hurley Substack.
I never thought we’d get to a place where handing over five years of your social media would feel like the least invasive part of entering the United States as a tourist, but here we are.
The Department of Homeland Security is proposing new rules for people using the ESTA system. These are visitors from places like the EU, the UK, Australia, Japan, and the rest of the Visa Waiver countries. People who currently don’t need a visa. And the list of what they’ll be required to hand over reads like something ripped from a security state fever dream.
Tourists would need to turn in: • Every social media account from the last five years • Full biometrics: face, fingerprints, iris scan, and yes, DNA • All phone numbers from the last five years • All email addresses from the last ten • IP addresses and metadata from any photos they submit • Names of immediate family members • Family members’ phone numbers from the last five years • Their dates and places of birth • Where they live • All business phone numbers from the last five years • All business emails from the last ten
And that’s just to come here on vacation. If you’re someone who actually needs a visa, I’d brace for something even more extreme.
This isn’t rumor or speculation. It’s right there in DHS documentation.
DNA is pretty much privacy endgame. That’s pure madness.
Especially when I think about the relatives, who don’t want to share parts of their DNA. Imagine what intelligence agencies will do with it. This should be illegal, shouldn’t it?
Could you tell me more on why having the DNA of a person is a “privacy endgame”? I don’t have much knowledge on DNA sampling and applications like in 23andMe, but isn’t it ultimately used for identification? Government IDs like SSN seem to already hold all information about you and your relation with others. Besides if they are so keen on collecting your DNA, they could just collect it without your knowledge from the places you stay or work at or anywhere in between.
Well, DNA contains the most sensitive information an individual has. Not only relations. For now, we have limited knowledge what the DNA is able to tell us about how a person looks, what kind of diseases he/she developes, etc… But very soon we will understand it much better and I think we’ll be shocked, what’s possible in the future.
And in that moment I don’t want my DNA to be out there. The possibilities of abuse are far too high in my opinion.
But it also strongly depends on the whole procedure: -> What kind of DNA-profile will be created? STR-profile or SNP-profile? STR = Short Tandem Repeats (less privacy intrusive, less markers) SNP = Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (used for 23andme, much more intrusive, usually > 300000 markers)
The golden-state-killer case shows: You can give your DNA and your cousin in the third degree can be identified (same grand-grand-grandfather) through SNP.
-> Will the sample be taken at the border? If the DNA has to be done directly at the border, who tells me the saliva sample will be disposed after creating the profile? We know US intelligence agencies collect all kinds of things.
But I need to say, I am not an expert in this field, just very cautious when it comes to genetic privacy.
I wonder what they include as “social media”. Because I’d have no problem showing off my huge Steam library! 😎
Yes, but it includes your chat and voice chat history in the CoD, League, Dota and Counter Strike lobbies… 😉
RIP
So they ask the onlyfan accounts to all women? I suspect they’re just hiring new actresses for their most lucrative online affair , since they all moved to Dubai…
Including FPS Games = terrorist. Mh yea you cant trust america lol
