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US immigration agencies read visa applicant's social media
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I mean if you're sharing your whole life out there for everyone to see under your real identity, then I can't really get mad at anyone for looking at it. I mean it's just there for anyone to see whether on Facebook or Mastodon.
Privacy is half the way governments and companies behave, and half you as an individual take precautions to protect yourself.
That doesn't matter though, cause you have to provide all your social media identifiers - so it doesn't matter if your handle is real or fake. You can choose to say "none", but then you'd be asked about that by a visa interview officer, and they could reject your application for being suspicious. On the other hand, if you really had an account on a mainstream social media site, and you used your real device fingerprint to access it at some stage, they could find out and you'd never be allowed into the country.
Source: https://t.ly/uBxvt
You’re not wrong about individual agency and privacy. If you post information to a public platform and cry foul about privacy when someone asks if it’s yours, that’s on you as an individual.
Since we, in the US, have no codified right to general privacy, it’s on us as much as possible to protect it and be aware of what we put out in public spaces. You never know when someone in power might choose to abuse the expectation of privacy, whether it’s an elected government or a private corp.