Privacy rankings list U.S. and Britain near the bottom

The war on terrorism erodes privacy — but some countries handle the issue better than others. So says Privacy International, which has just released its Privacy and Human Rights Report on the most privacy-intrusive countries in the world. No suprises here, we think. Britain came in last among democracies, the result no doubt of the extensive use of closed circuit cameras in both private and public spaces. The United States, sad to say, did not do much better. It scored a 2.0 on privacy compared to Britain’s 1.5 (the lower the score, the less the privacy) and Canada, Belgium, and Germany’s 3.0 scores of 3.0 and higher. Singapore, Russia, and China all scored 1.3.

Privacy International calculated its ranking by taking into account: constitutional and statutory protection; privacy enforcement; ID cards and biometrics; visual surveillance; communications interception; finances and trans-border travel; and democratic safeguards. Thus Russia and China, which have relatively few surveillance cameras for countries of their size, scored low due to their poor records on democracy and communications intercepts. The United States, for its part, suffered due to its lax statutory protection of personal records in the private sector, its data collection policies at the border, and the want of an independant privacy oversight agency.

Privacy International’s Top Ten:

1. Germany

2. Canada

3. Belgium

3. Austria

5. Greece

6. Argentina

6. Hungary

8. France

8. Poland

8. Portugal

The Bottom Ten

28. Israel

28. Sweden

30. United States

31. Thailand

31. Philippines

33. Britain

34. Singapore

34. Russia

36. Malaysia

36. China

-read more in Katie Fretland’s Globe and Mail report