So far so good, everyone who has nothing to fear should thus not be worried. But what will be checked? Will it be Islamic publications only? Or will also critics about the US be judged through which you may risk to get immigration refused? Or worse…

The voluntarily provided data on the Esta sheets is not the same than granting full access to the US border control. So what will happen in case you’re getting detained for a while at the border, officers log onto your account and publish things they should not? Or that would put you under a bad light just to deny you immigration? This would be deliberate… A

And another problem pops up: as most of us on th “old continent” are posting not in English, will there be neutral and qualified translators available? Or shall we translate on our own and let border control belief we’re not telling them nonsense? This goes especially for small languages like Luxembourgish.

Then, will you have to show all your social accounts? This would be like Facebook, one personal Twitter account (or also the four professional accounts?), my Google+ account, Instagram (ok, fair enough, you can log into that one via Facebook), WhatsApp, Snap chat, etc. etc. This might end up in a never ending story, ok, sorry, I see this is a paradox...

And last but not least: passwords are getting ever more complex, for obvious safety reasons. One of mine has something about 20 to 25 characters with no logical sense at all and it includes special characters, numbers, capitals etc. I simply can’t remember this password, therefore it’s stored on my desktop computer in a locally installed password management tool for which I have a master password. You see the problem?

So my suggestion is in this cases to define a specific but same (and secure) password for your social network accounts just before flying to the US. Remind this code or note it down somewhere. As soon as you passed border control or latest at your return home, switch back to your former passwords on the different channels just to be sure no one else will have access to your accounts later on.

While writing this, I’m wondering what will happen with the collected passwords by US border control. Will they be stored in a huge password database, to make hacking accounts in general easier?

I can only finish with this quote: brave new world!

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