Privacy perceptions vary wildly by country

HOW personal is social-networking information? Or call records? As Twitter goes public on November 7th and details of American surveillance leak out, the issue of digital privacy is only growing. Yet there are significant variations in views across countries. Americans and China hold opposite opinions about location, purchases and website visits. Where most Americans treat this information as private at a ratio of at least two to one, most Chinese treat them as barely private or not private at all. More broadly, India and China seem to have fewer privacy qualms than the West, while Brazil holds similar views. Indians, interestingly, ascribe little privacy to information about children. Most intriguingly, the three large developing countries have very different perceptions about health and genetic information: opinions there are equally divided. But in the West, about five to one favour treating the data privately, according to a survey by the Boston Consulting Group.