Last December, reports began to circulate about the US Government’s proposed new entry requirements for tourists. Travelers may soon be asked to list and make public the social media accounts they’ve held over the last five years, and much more beyond that.
Laws around the globe focus on positive rights, or control over existing data. You can often request access, correction, deletion, or raise an objection through regulations such as the GDPR or CCPA. Practically none give you the reverse, negative rights.
In other words: the right to produce no data broadly doesn’t exist.
This is fantastically well-said and is something that I think doesn’t get talked about enough in discussions about privacy in general.
A system like the one we are currently building creates an environment where even the few protections the law does give in regards to privacy no longer matter. You may have rights regarding the use of your data, or to not participate in specific aspects of society, or to choose not to have a social media presence, but what can any of these rights do if the world we build makes it impossible to participate in without giving up said rights? That is not freedom. You may technically have all of these rights but by proxy you actually don’t.
The world has been shifting in this direction for a long time but what we see happening right now I feel is a very massive, very calculated shift to a world where proprietary ecosystems are the norm, where everything is locked down and controlled. That is not a world that I want to live in, and we need to be speaking up about it.
I haven’t had a social media account since 2010 - what are they going to do?
Luckily, I’ve already been to the US in 2016 and have no intentions of ever returning.
It does look as though CBP may now back down from plans to screen all visitors’ social accounts. There has been a strong backlash from the travel industry in particular.
That said, it was never just going to be social media. The new requirements published on the Federal Register back in December were sweeping:
a. Telephone numbers used in the last five years;
b. Email addresses used in the last ten years;
c. IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos;
d. Family member names (parents, spouse, siblings, children);
e. Family number telephone numbers used in the last five years;
f. Family member dates of birth;
g. Family member places of birth;
h. Family member residencies;
i. Biometrics—face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris;
j. Business telephone numbers used in the last five years;
k. Business email addresses used in the last ten years.
Thank you! That means a lot.
And I completely agree. It’s utterly terrifying not only to see a regression of rights, but to then witness that become accepted and normalised.