US may tie social media to visa applications | Hacker News Reader

US may tie social media to visa applications

bbc.com

I think it is long past the date when the EU should have started to apply reciprocally onerous standards to the US citizens traveling to Europe. Unless the US travelers start raising fuss at home about their treatment abroad, this BS will continue.

I am pretty sure that this nonsense would change very fast the moment CEOs of big US companies get a proper interrogation on arrival at Heathrow or Frankfurt and/or get denied entry for arbitrary and undisclosed reasons (as is common in the US).

(before someone jumps on me that the article is about visas and not ESTA applying to EU countries - well, the ESTA questionnaire is pretty much identical to the visa one, including the "have you been a member of a terrorist organization?" questions. Just you normally don't need to go to an embassy interview and it can be handled online as long as you don't get flagged for some reason).

It's happening soon, with the ETIAS: https://etias.com/

The EU did consider reciprocally onerous standards. The European Commission decided against revoking visa-free travel privileges to Americans in March 2017.

European Parliament resolution: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&langua...

European Commission response: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/AUTO/?uri=CELEX:52...

European Commission press release: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-1148_en.htm

Social media reporting only applies to visa applications. Most EU states have visa-free travel privileges to the US, so this is not applicable to them. However, the US would require social media disclosure for Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Romania nationals under this proposal. The US does not need social media information from most EU citizens. We get this from their interior ministries, who do a much better job. (Nationals' own domestic spy agencies are the likely source of these "arbitrary" reasons for detention and denial of admittance.)

I don't know the user handles of 90% of my accounts of the past 5 years. I use a different email for every service I use. Most of my profiles use fake names. My phone number has not changed in 5 years, but by a quirk in the system I would have been going through about 4 temporary phone numbers while switching providers.

It will be fun times.

> 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.

>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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com