The Trump administration released a notice this week on requiring social media data from certain incoming tourists to the U.S. This unprecedented rule would apply to the 42 nations listed under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) and may include biometric data like DNA.
Homeland Security has not yet finalized these changes, but a lot of folks already hate it.
Submit your Facebook history for entry
On Wednesday, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) published a 60-day notice on upcoming changes to rules around visitors to the U.S. Many of the changes involve tourist data collection by the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA), and one point in particular stood out from the rest.
“In order to comply with the January 2025 Executive Order 14161 (Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats), CBP is adding social media as a mandatory data element for an ESTA application,” it says. “The data element will require ESTA applicants to provide their social media from the last 5 years.”
The ESTA is a U.S. travel application available to those eligible for the VWP. Visitors from one of the 42 approved nations can visit the U.S. without a Visa as long as their ESTA is approved.
If these new rules make it through without changes, the form will ask for five years of social media history.
That’s not all, however. According to the next proposal, the same executive order mandates the collection of a lot more data from VWP visitors, “when feasible.” This includes phone numbers used in the last five years and email addresses from the last ten, information about family members, and even biometric data—”face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris.”
A CBP spokesperson told NBC News that this is all about keeping Americans safe, especially after the shooting of National Guard members by an Afghan national.
Notably, Afghanistan is not one of the 42 VWP nations.
“Who’s showing up for the World Cup?”
Though some defended the proposed rule changes, many worried about the impact this will have on tourism. Regardless of the administration’s true motives, people tend to resist giving up that much private information. The tourism industry in the U.S. is huge, and this is going to hurt—especially ahead of the World Cup.
“Trump wants every tourist’s social media, emails, and phone numbers just to visit, congrats on killing tourism and turning America into a paranoid police state,” said @RichardAngwin on X.
“I’ve traveled a lot over the past 20 years, and not once has any country, even China, checked my phone,” claimed @abierkhatib. “Who’s showing up for the World Cup, hahahaaa.”
Others, unconvinced by the claim that CBP is trying to keep out potential terrorists from nations not eligible for the VWP, considered potential nefarious motivations for this data collection.
“I cannot stress this enough, it is not safe to come here and you should not do it,” wrote @1masoren. “It’s also painfully obvious this is going to be used to harvest information for Palantir.”
“This is an empire harvesting data which can be used to locate and kill anyone on earth,” @RITB_ said.
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