As each countries laws, identities & systems are different, I think we should add a section that gives specific actions steps for every country - long project and will of course need a lot of community participation, but I think something is better than nothing in this case.
These steps should be very minimal and high impact.
I think it’s an excellent idea, it would be great to have a guide for each “country”, it would take a long time to set up but it would be so useful.
I agree. This would be very interesting. I’ve done some research into this in the past collecting the name of laws and regulations restricting free speech or enforcing censorship by countries, but never really finished my project.
As the main restrictions that make a country unfree in the PG context I would propose:
Protection of free speech. Pretty much every country except the US doesn’t have it, or claims to have it (yes, even China has free speech in their constitution) but then arbitrarily restricts it in often very broad ways (e.g. some of the terms of “we have free speech except for…” I found during my research were: harmful or offensive speech, hate speech, racism, antisemitism, incitement, abusive or insulting words, insulting politicians, disparagement of the monarch or president, obscenity, indecency, corruption of public morals, speech that is offensive to public morality, holocaust denial, use of symbols of unconstitutional organisations, approving crimes, insulting religions, blasphemy, revealing someone’s biological sex or birth name, positive presentation of drugs, advocating for extremist political positions, humiliation of human dignity, disseminating unreliable information, discrediting the armed forces, spreading disinformation, making falsehoods, distorting the truth, spreading rumours, destroying the order of society, inciting division of the country, injuring the reputation of state organs, contempt against government, speech that can damage the public order or friendly relations with foreign states, criticizing socialism). The last one is clearly Chinese, but the majority of these are actually restrictions in supposedly liberal places like the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Australia…
Absence of Internet censorship. (This would include governments like France, Russia, Australia and Brazil ordering sites like X, Facebook, Youtube or Rumble to delete videos and accounts, or indirect censorship like the German NetzDG.)
Legality of end-to-end encryption. (Coming to my mind are the EU’s Chat Control or the UK Online Safety Act that basically require backdoors.)
Absence of key disclosure laws. i.e. the requirement to provide a password or biometrics for unlocking a device or decrypting data to law enforcement, border control etc.
Legality of anonymous payments. Specifically I would look at Monero here which as far as I know is banned from exchanges in Japan and South Korea and I’m sure is pretty much illegal in countries like China or Russia.
Ability to publish or host things anonymously. Thinking for example of France and Germany legally requiring you to publish your name and address if you host a server or publish a website, respectively.
Legality of VPNs, Tor and I2P. This is the most obvious sign of a totalitarian country and as far as I know, of the big countries, only China and Russia are really cracking down on VPN/Tor use while Western countries don’t (yet).
Coukd be interesting, but it seems like its a lot of very hard work, and it could get this pg reference website banned by some country with low scores, since were pointing fingers.
We should thinknif its part of the core values of the movement.
I think this is out of scope, there are already a lot of ressources about freedom and democracy. There is Also Wikipedia (privacy law (Other wiki articles about Privacy) About the specific points mentioned by @Regime6045 , it would be nice but on one hand it would be very time sensitive, secondly it would be prone to errors. For example, it isn’t an offense in China to use a VPN. To make sure we are accurate we would need locals and lawyers from every country to help us, which is impossible. And I don’t believe a “This is not legal advice” warning would work, as people will still take it as legal advice.strong text
I do agree. It is maybe interesting for stuff like “choose a VPS provider by country” but for most people it’s irrelevant as they can’t just change their country. It’s also a lot of work and likely to have errors - that’s why I started with my research but never finished. Would be cool to have it as a separate, crowdsourced project though.
I just changed my mind. I think it would be very nice to have such guide. There is very few information about privacy in “third-world” countries and most is probably inaccurate. Plus, it would help so PG can “globalise” and easily take into account countries ≠issues.
But before we dive into solutions to protect your privacy, we would need to detail the “Privacy environment”
Country/region A:
-Privacy-protecting laws
-Implementation of those (respect, fines, etc.)
-Privacy-harming laws (eg. E2EE ban, data retention, etc)
-Implementation of those (respect, fines, etc.)
-Censorship laws (DNS blocking sites, GFW, social media takedowns, VPN/TOR blocking
-Implementation of those (respect, fines, etc.)
+: Relationships with other countries.
Couple notes:
1)Privacy-harming&censorship could be merged.
2) For multi-level states (EU and the US), we could have a upper level section (EU directives / US federal laws) and then have indivual member states/ states section when something relevant is worth mentionning.
