I only know western countries but from those I’d say Germany and Switzerland.
It’s highly respected in Germany to have a low online profile - pay in cash, stay off online systems.
I feel it’s similar in Switzerland - just with military training, more guns, mined bridges and nazi gold.
The current german government is trying to build a surveillance state and force chat apps into adding backdoors to their encryption and the culture is shifting for the worse with stuff like tiktok still growing.
Right now I'd say switzerland is better in the privacy department (and a few other ones, but that's beside the point).
To be honest. If you’re online you should expect to be compromised. If you want to be privacy obsessed- focus on countries that allow you to be offline. That is an aspect Germany and Switzerland are a bit unique.
By comparison Scandinavia has a high degree of trust in government and everything is online and connected. It’s convenient but also - if you do not trust your data on the government’s hands - you’re not gonna like it here.
Germany allows you to be more … disconnected.
Privacy is diametrically opposed to the ability to control the people you rule over, so no state is privacy friendly. There are only degrees of extremism. The poorer countries are more privacy friendly in the world because they lack the resources to spy on everything. If they could they would spy more.
I was gonna say this as well. You can go 2 opposite directions. You can go for a country like Switzerland which has a lot of privacy rules in place. It generally protects you from malicious non-state actors. But you can also go the other way with a developing country whose government does not have the means or capability to monitor you. The tradeoff is your data on government systems is probably already compromised, just not by the government itself.
Unfortunately Switzerland has no power. They were bullied out of the private banking they were famous for and they will get bullied whenever they have info that some other western state wants. Anyway, the privacy benefits they offer are mostly cosmetic. No ruler wants privacy. When we understand that, then we can stop looking for things that don't exist and start creating solutions.
If the GDPR would actually be enforced every time a situation calls for it, if the EU Commission wasn't made of technologically inept idiots, and if Irelands DPC would stop protecting Meta, then anywhere in the EU.
That's a lot of ifs though
How to quantify that?
Number of surveillance cameras per square km?
Being members of international intelligence sharing networks?
Data protection laws in place? Level of enforcement?
Not sure theres an easy answer to the question, I think you'd have to put together data based on a wide set of criteria, and even then you would only be able to work off publically accessible/known info
Why do you ask? Did your government put a camera in your bathroom?
I'm looking to move from the US because of their increasing wish to mimic China's great firewall.
Increasing? Brother if the US government wants to know what you are looking at its already over for you. They can know everything about you in like 5 minutes.
I'm Aussie and I don't really closely follow the news, but that sounds more like a censorship problem than a privacy one? Even the Chinese find a way around the wall though. My governments been trying to protect its citizens from the horrors of the open internet for decades, they're... not good at it. I understand the desire for more freedom though.
One of the best is Iceland
