US authorities are considering stricter entry requirements, which could affect French citizens traveling under the ESTA program.
Travelers departing for the United States may soon face a new type of screening. According to the New York Times (December 9) and the Washington Post (December 10), Washington is already considering extending the review of social media activity to tourists.
The proposal materialized on Wednesday with the publication of a notice in the Federal Register, the official US journal: the Trump administration now wants to require visitors benefiting from the Visa Waiver Program (ESTA) to provide their social media account history for the past five years.
The text, which notably concerns French, British, German, Israeli, Japanese, and Australian citizens, could come into effect within sixty days, barring any legal challenges. It plans to add social media profiles to the list of mandatory data for obtaining an ESTA, but that’s not all. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) also intends to collect phone numbers used in the past five years, email addresses from the past ten years, as well as information on family members—names, dates and places of birth, phone numbers, and residential addresses.
To be continued…