Overview
- U.S. Customs and Border Protection proposes making disclosure of social media from the past five years a mandatory element of ESTA applications for visitors from visa‑waiver countries.
- The plan would add data fields including phone numbers used in the last five years, email addresses used in up to the last ten years, family members’ names and birth dates, IP addresses, and photo metadata.
- CBP outlines new biometric steps for ESTA, including a required selfie with liveness detection and collection of facial, fingerprint, iris and DNA data as part of pre‑travel vetting.
- The agency says it aims to shift to a mobile‑only ESTA submission to improve identity checks and curb fraudulent third‑party websites, and it describes geolocation checks to confirm departures.
- The proposal follows broader Trump administration efforts to tighten vetting, drawing warnings from civil‑liberties and travel industry groups about privacy risks, speech chilling effects and potential hits to tourism.