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Every US immigrant’s social media history is up for grabs starting Oct. 18.

The US Department of Homeland Security quietly introduced a new regulation last week that would allow the agency to collect data from all immigrants’ social media history, including posts from their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. It would also affect green card holders and naturalized citizens. The new provision, introduced to the Federal Register on Sept. 18, was first spotted by Buzzfeed News.  

The change adds to increased government scrutiny of immigrants’ internet activity, which has been growing since the administration of President Barack Obama and has continued into the presidency of Donald Trump. Border patrol agents said in July that they wouldn’t search through a person’s cloud data. On Sept. 13, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the DHS after 11 travelers had their laptops and phones searched without warrants at US borders. It’s been reported that border agents have also been checking people’s Facebook profiles. The US Department of State in May said it wanted to search through five years of social media history to grant US visas.  

Last week’s policy update appears to continue the collection of data on immigrants’ social media activity long after crossing the border. The new regulation would amass a database of all immigrants, including green card holders and naturalized citizens, and contain details like handles, aliases and search results on social media. Homeland Security could also collect data on anybody who communicates with an immigrant, according to BuzzFeed.

Homeland Security didn’t provide a comment.

While some people view their social media profiles as a haven for friends and family, government officials see it as a cache of data they can use to decide if a person is a national threat. That’s raising privacy concerns.

“This Privacy Act notice makes clear that the government intends to retain the social media information of people who have immigrated to this country, singling out a huge group of people to maintain files on what they say,” said Faiz Shakir, national policy director of the ACLU. “This would undoubtedly have a chilling effect on the free speech that’s expressed every day on social media.”

Despite all the demand for social media information, there’s little information on how effective it is. The DHS reviewed its pilot program for social media screening in February, and said “it is not clear DHS is measuring and evaluating the pilots’ results to determine how well they are performing against set criteria.” 

First published Sept. 26, 11:39 a.m. PT.
Update, 1:26 p.m. PT: Adds a comment from the ACLU. 

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