You know when you travel overseas to foreign countries, you typically have to fill out forms that require you to leave your name, home address, passport number, address of where you’ll be staying in the country, and so on. For the most part this is pretty standard, but in the US visitors could soon be asked to leave their social media handles as well.
There has been a recent proposal which suggests that visitors traveling to and from the US will have an additional data field that lets them put their social media handles. Presumably this will allow US customs to check your social media status to see what you have been up to, or if there could be any signs that you’ve been up to no good, because we all know that sometimes people forget that the internet is a very public place.
However the good news for privacy advocates is that this will apparently not be a mandatory field that users have to fill out. That being said the fact that it isn’t mandatory raises questions as to how effective this will be then? After all if you refuse to fill out that section on the form, there’s really nothing that they can do about it.
In any case this is simply a proposal and the public has 60 days to comment on it before it will be formally considered.
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