The US may soon require foreign tourists to hand over five years of social media history in order to enter the country.

US Customs and Border Protection proposed the new requirements as part of a sweeping plan impacting the Electronic System for Travel Authorization process. Under the Visa Waiver Program, tourists from 42 countries can visit the US without a visa for up to 90 days, but they must apply for authorisation through the ESTA.

With the new proposal, tourists from those countries― which includes the UK France, Japan, Australia and Germany ― will have to provide five years of social media history as one of the “mandatory data elements” in the application. They could also be asked to provide past phone numbers, email addresses and other digital identifiers.

The announcement of this plan on Wednesday sparked a great deal of outrage and concern from travellers, civil rights groups and industry professionals who worry about the impact on privacy and free expression ― as well as the already-fragile international tourism sector.

HuffPost asked tourism industry specialists, privacy experts and free speech advocates to weigh in on how they see this policy reshaping travel and what broader implications they expect.

The policy brings up serious issues around digital surveillance, free speech and privacy.

To privacy and civil liberties advocates, the mandatory disclosure proposal reflects a broader shift toward expansive border surveillance.

“This is just the latest development in a decade-long effort by the federal government to use social media surveillance against non-citizens,” Sophia Cope, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told HuffPost in an email. “It has not proven effective at finding terrorists and other bad guys. But it has chilled free speech and invaded the privacy of innocent travellers, along with that of their American family, friends and colleagues.”

She added that this policy would “exacerbate civil liberties harms, especially if it comes with the same expectation the government has for student visa applicants ― that they must make public otherwise private social media accounts.”

For lawyer and migration expert Petra Molnar, the proposal is part of a pattern that has become all-too familiar under the current Trump administration ― expanding border surveillance “far beyond what is reasonably necessary” for routine travel screening.

“Social media history is not a neutral data point,” she said. “It reveals personal beliefs, political opinions, social circles, mental health struggles and interactions that were never intended for government scrutiny.”

The result, Molnar argued, is the normalisation of a world in which privacy ends at the border ― “even though borders are precisely where human rights protections should be strongest.”

“Requiring tourists to turn over five years of social media history, old email addresses, prior phone numbers, IP address data and even biometric identifiers marks one of the largest expansions of digital vetting in US history,” she said. “Practices like these also move the US border from a geographic location at a point of entry toward a system of deep, retrospective investigation into travellers’ online lives.”

Under the new CBP proposal, foreign tourists would be required to share five years of social media history in order to enter the country.

As CBP already has the authority to seize and search digital devices, this proposed social media requirement raises even more........

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