The Countries Ranked Best in Privacy Laws

BestVPN.org  ranks which countries ranked best in privacy laws

Courtesy of bestvpn.org

By Alex Grant

The last year has seen some disheartening changes in the legal and geopolitical realm as far as privacy is concerned. Countries like Russia and China have enacted a number of privacy-invasive laws. Others like the UK and the U.S. have chosen to dismantle laws meant to protect civil rights and freedoms. A recent index of the best countries for privacy ranks crisis-devastated Greece much higher than America, based on fourteen criteria spanning laws, technology, and democratic safeguards. But the bitter news comes as no surprise.

As the year started, the U.S. Congress passed a law that extended extremely invasive and unconstitutional NSA surveillance powers. The signed bill – S. 139 – reauthorized Section 702, a part of the FISA Amendments Act used by the NSA to justify its unrestricted, warrantless collection of Petabytes of chats, text messages, emails, and browsing history of American citizens. Mass surveillance allowed under this law operates behind the scenes violating Americans’ Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

As the law was moving from the House to the Senate and then to the president’s desk, the public opinion was continuously manipulated as the president himself said it was about “foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land.”

The government also claims to enforce the “fair trade.” At the same time, the Federal Trade Commission keeps dismantling the Internet freedom by repealing net neutrality rules and giving well-funded corporations a carte blanche to buy their way through competition and have their services delivered quicker and more efficiently on the Internet.

The current legislators are making giant leaps to dismantling our online privacy, so it comes as no surprise that the U.S. is nowhere on the list of the best countries for privacy, ranked by laws, visual surveillance, data retention, workplace monitoring, and democratic safeguards among other things. See the full list and the breakdown of criteria here.

About Alex Grant

Alex is a location-independent product manager. He started BestVPN because finding a VPN for things like Netflix became an integral part of his travel agenda but he soon realized two things: there's a lot of bullshit reviews and there’s a lot more to VPNs than he originally thought. 



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