Privacy International Report

The U.K. organization Privacy International, together with the U.S.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, have published their 2007 privacy rankings for European and some other countries. In their judgement Canada has in the last year slipped from the best category (“significant protections and safeguards”) to the middle category (“some safeguards but weakened protection”). They provide a detailed analysis that forms the basis for this judgement.

Clearly intended to shock, the report now puts the United States into the worst possible category, that of an “endemic surveillance society.”

This report is the result of serious analysis and deserves careful attention. My only criticism has to do with the terrible online presentation of the data. The map gets its colour coding messed up, the chart presents miniature text amid a lattice of black lines and the text is unconfined and sprawls into unreadable lengths across the screen. The whole winds up looking like some illegible wodge that Jakob Nielsen might have produced. Someone needs to read more Tufte.