More Americans than Canadians (almost half) find anti-terrorism laws
intrusive – Queen’s international surveillance survey finds
Queen’s Surveillance Project benchmarks global attitudes about being 
watched
KINGSTON, Ont. – Almost half of Canadians and even more Americans say 
they find
new laws aimed at protecting national security post 9/11 intrusive.
 
That’s just one of the wide-ranging findings of a survey on the 
surveillance and privacy
attitudes and experiences of 9,000 people in eight countries initiated 
by the Queen’s
University-based Surveillance Project. The multi-disciplinary group is 
studying the
Globalization of Personal Data (GPD) and the surveillance associated 
with that flow – by
governments, employers, and via technologies like personal computers, 
biometrics and
global-positioning systems – on ordinary people.
 
“We are seeing a high level of concern in many parts of the world about 
the intrusiveness
of these post 9/11 laws. Most surprising is the strong American 
reaction to its new
national security laws – 15 per cent said these laws were highly 
intrusive,” says Elia
Zureik, lead researcher.
 
This is believed to be the first cross-cultural study of its kind that 
explores relationships
between attitudes and experiences, and how much people trust 
corporations and
governments to handle personal information, including the sharing of 
such information
with third parties, the researcher says.
 
Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada 
and
conducted by Ipsos Reid, the survey included nearly 50 questions on 
participant’s
attitudes about issues like consumer surveillance, racial profiling at 
airports, national ID
cards, media coverage of surveillance issues, workplace privacy, 
knowledge of privacy
regulations, control over personal data and public trust in government.
 
Their answers reveal a variety of cultural commonalities and 
differences culled from
participants in Canada, the U.S., China, France, Spain, Hungary, Mexico 
and Brazil.
 
Highlights
 
Across the globe a majority of respondents:
• believe surveillance laws are intrusive (U.S. 57 per cent, Canada 48 
per cent,
Spain 53 per cent, Mexico 46 per cent, Brazil 41 per cent, France 40 
per cent )
• worry about providing personal information on websites (China 54 per 
cent,
Canada 66 per cent, Brazil 70 per cent, Spain 62 per cent and U.S. 60 
per cent).
• believe the use of closed circuit television deters in-store crime 
(Mexico 88 per
cent, U.S. 80 per cent, Canada 79 per cent, France 73 per cent).
• rejected out-right the premise that airport authorities should give 
extra security
checks to visible minority passengers. About 60 per cent of Chinese, 
Hungarians,
Brazilians, and Canadians but only a third of Americans found such 
practices
unacceptable.
 
Culturally distinctive survey findings include:
• 63 per cent of Chinese respondents trust the government to protect 
the personal
information it collects compared to just 48 per cent of Canadians and a 
mere 20
per cent of Brazilians say they trust their respective governments with 
their
personal information.
• The majority of respondents do not believe that they have much say in 
what
happens to their personal information. Only roughly 30 per cent of 
Canadians,
Americans, Spaniards and Hungarians believe they have complete or a lot 
of say.
Chinese and French respondents felt they had the most say at 67 and 60 
per cent,
compared with Mexicans 40 per cent and Brazilians 34 per cent.
• Eighty-two percent of Canadians and 80 percent of Americans report 
themselves
as being knowledgeable about the Internet compared to just 35 percent of
Mexicans and 33 percent of Brazilian respondents.
 
“We have learned that there is an urgent need to educate the public 
about the
complexities of the information age, to demand organizational and 
governmental
accountability with regard to handling personal data, and to develop 
appropriate theory to
explain and predict flows of personal data and to connect this with 
privacy ethics and
government policy,” Dr. Zureik says.
 
A team of international surveillance experts will meet at Queen’s later 
this week to
further study the data collected by survey.
 
For more information on the Surveillance Project, an executive summary 
of the GPD
survey findings or pdf version of the survey’s Ipsos Reid report, go to:
http://www.queensu.ca/sociology/Surveillance/
 
To learn more about Research at Queen's http://www.queensu.ca/research/
 
Contact:
Sarah Withrow, 613-533-3280, [log in to unmask]
Lorinda Peterson, 613-533-3234, [log in to unmask]
Attention broadcasters: Queen's now has facilities to provide broadcast 
quality audio
and video feeds. For television interviews, we can provide a live, 
real-time double ender
from Kingston fibre optic cable and broadcast quality radio 
transmissions from our on campus
studio. Please call for details.
 
Joan Sharpe
Project Manager, The Surveillance Project
c/o Department of Sociology
Queen's University
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6
(613) 533-6000, ext. 78867
(613) 533-6499 FAX
http://www.queensu.ca/sociology/Surveillance 
 
 
 

****************************************************
This is a message from the SURVEILLANCE listserv
for research and teaching in surveillance studies.

To unsubscribe, please send the following message to
<[log in to unmask]>:

UNSUBSCRIBE SURVEILLANCE

For further help, please visit:

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help
****************************************************