“To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M and J non-immigrant visas will be asked to adjust the privacy settings on all their social media profiles to ‘public’”, the official said. “The enhanced social media vetting will ensure we are properly screening every single person attempting to visit our country.”
And the shittiness continues
Why any international students still want to go to the US is beyond me.
They finally catch up on technology just in time to be behind again.
Many are rejecting social media at this point. That number will continue to grow
So, what happens when someone that doesn’t have social media accounts applies for a visa? I assume they just won’t believe such a thing and deny the visa since you can’t prove a negative. Would it make sense for such people to make a social media account and just not use it? This is ridiculous.
I guess start one, and just post praises to glorious leaders
It would make considerably more sense to not travel to the US, for education or anything else
The US has education?
Parts of the US have excellent education. Or, well, had
By this point who in their right mind would willingly enter the USA…
Everyone hated on her for speaking the truth.
“Do not come”
and if you don’t have one?
To them that is already suspicious enough to not let you in the country and put you on some list of known terrorists.
opens fedi
presents timeline filled with non-binary catgirls meowing at each other
If you just have some random handle that isn’t your name. How are they gonna trace that to you?
How are they gonna trace that to you?
The modern Internet is essentially about spying on you as much as possible and then selling the data to whoever wants to buy it. Linking identities with devices/browsers is worth a lot of money and so most every website/app has a way of linking you to the devices and software that you use.
Unless the user took some pretty extreme measures to create the account, they’ve likely logged in from a phone/ip/browser that has been linked to their real identity at some point in its lifetime. That link will be sold to data brokers and used to tie the random handle to you, the person. Then the State Department just buys that information.
Alternatively, you should be assuming that sovereign entities with the means are reading all public network data. There’s a lot of information that you can learn from that as well. Like, over time, the posts from the ‘random’ account could be strongly correlated to the times that you were accessing the site even if all of the data was encrypted with HTTPS.
Alternatively, alternatively. There is a threat known as Store Now Decrypt Later (SNDL). The idea is basically: Quantum Computers are coming and they can break some cryptographic primitives. If someone saves all of the encrypted traffic that they would want to read, in a few years they will have the means to read that data. We won’t know when this moment occurs, because it’ll likely be a secret, but we do know that it will happen and so you should additionally assume that anything that isn’t using post-quantum encryption, which transited a public network, will be read and used to link you to your identities.
This is, essentially, the core thing that the Privacy community is attempting to mitigate.
I’m not a privacy expert.
And I know that, sadly, they probably have a lot more data on me than I’d like. Even though I don’t have traditional social media anymore, and I use VPNs to access Lemmy, that’s just normie precaution stuff. Anyway I do have a Google, Apple, accounts and the like.
My question is this: what do you / y’all think about the prospect of “poisoning the well”?
Meaning: you set up multiple traditional social media accounts, generate fake profile photos for them, give them the same real name as you and part of the country as you live in, and have AI chatbots fill ‘em up with generated posts matching a particular “personality profile”?
Would that be an effective countermeasure against this sort of data collection? Increase the noise-to-signal ratio?
Just thinking out loud here.
Officer: please wait on the side
Welp, looks like I won’t be allowed into America. Oh no. How unfortunate.
My visa application got rejected for posting a watermelon emoji on Myspace in nineteen dickety two.
I see many of these students straight up deleting their profiles.
Im seeing people come in and out with burner phones that are set up to look clean and minimal.
Alternatively, they’ll have a “public facing” social media, and a real one.
yeah, I can see not having a social media profile at all being treated as tantamount to sedition before too long
I LOVE THE SUPREME LEADER! LONG LIVE THE SUPREME LEADER!
whispers: “have they left yet?” 👀
I’m so happy that I was able to skip all that stuff.
I stoped using my mainstream social media around the years ago.
I kept the profiles, and I think it is good as I can just share them if I’m ever required to.
Anyone applying to colleges probably has one already.
Which is probably a net positive on their lives. The less social media the better.
I will imagine that will be seen as suspicious. Interesting businesss to sell clean aged social media account for US only vetting…
Me: I don’t have a social media account Officer: Sure buddy, wait on a side until you do.
Careful curation
Wasn’t this always the case? I remember flying into the US during the Biden era as a tourist and had to declare my social media accounts.
Biden didn’t seem to care if you called him a “Demented Old Man”
This current administration is led by a crybaby
Both claims are true.
Wait really? 😂
Yes I recalled that too but I don’t recall the public aspect to be turned on.
“You better not have said anything mean on there that hurts Donald’s feefees.”
The subtext here: “if you post anti-Israel stuff, you can kiss your chances goodbye!”
