There are few empirical, comparative cross-cultural studies that have dealt with surveillance and privacy issues. Here is an interesting exception – an international survey on surveillance and privacy conducted at Queen’s University, Canada in 2006. The survey had respondents in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Hungary, Mexico, Spain and the US. The survey is reported in detail in the book Surveillance, Privacy, and the Globalisation of Personal Information (2010). Here are few interesting and still timely remarks from the book.

Already on the first pages Elia Zureik and Lynda Harling Stalker state that ”in highly individualistic societies as those in Canada and the United States, privacy is linked to individual rights, sometimes at the expense of collective and communitarian rights.” (Zureik&Stalker, 13)

”It must be said that, as an individual concern, privacy is not an issue that dominates people’s lives – not in the sense that academics, theorists, and even privacy advocates talk about it. It is only when privacy is brought to the level of daily experience in cases involving credit and identity fraud and violation of individual rights through surveillance that people become aware of the importance of privacy and express the need for its protection.” (Zureik, 349)

For example attitudes in China, Brazil, Mexico and to some extent Spain the protection of individual privacy is not that important in the minds of the respondents. This does not mean that privacy would not be considered important, if it is connected to protection of property and bodily security. (…)  In countries like Mexico and Brazil personal security is regarded as a precondition for privacy, leading to support for surveillance devices such as closed circuit television to safeguard the private sphere. As a result of this prerequisite, security-based privacy is treated as a kind of privilege from which a significant part of the population is excluded. It is bodily and spatial privacy rather than informational and communicational privacy that concern people most in Mexico and Brazil.(Zureik,350)

There are also substantial differences how government protection on information privacy is welcomed. Respondents in China had the greatest trust in the government, the lowest level of trust was in the US (Zureik,350).

Although at the time when this research was done there was not too much public discussion about collecting and selling user information, nearly one-half of the respondents reject outright the sharing of information with third parties, particularly with foreign third parties such as governments and foreign businesses (Zureik,351). It would be interesting to know what they would answer in 2014.

Zureik, Elia (et al.) (2010) Surveillance, Privacy, and the Globalization of Personal Information. International Comparisions. Montreal&Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

  ES