countries

Internet adoption has a positive link with wellbeing, according to an international research project. But it's a mixed picture and cause and effect could be questioned. The research comes from the Oxford Internet Institute, which examined a wide ... range of studies into psychological wellbeing and mental health. They covered a total of 2.4 million people across 168 countries at various points between 2006 and 2021. (Source: ac.uk ) The researchers then cross-referenced the results with figures on broadband and mobile Internet use in the relevant countries at the relevant times. The biggest ... (view more)

Facebook's parent company Meta has been fined more than a billion dollars for failing to protect user data. The case involves the way Facebook transfers customer data between Europe and the United States. Under the European Union's privacy rules, ... businesses are restricted in the way they transfer personal data to non-EU countries. In principle this can only happen when the non-EU country has laws that offer a similar level of privacy data protection. Some counties have a "data adequacy" agreement with the EU, meaning the country's privacy rules are officially classed as strong enough. In ... (view more)

Nine in ten Americans are now online according to new figures. But it's the United Kingdom that is "most online" and least subject to Internet restrictions. The figures come from Proxyrack, a company with a clear interest in places where users may ... want to disguise their identity of location. It wanted to see if there was any connection between how widespread Internet use was and how freely people could use the Internet. (Source: proxyrack.com ) The usage figures came from Statista and shows 99,231 out of every 100,000 people in the UK had used the internet recently. That was followed by Japan ... (view more)

A US official has beaten a Russian opponent to become head of a major Internet body. The result could make a big difference to online technology, particularly on the issue of blocks and censorship. Doreen Bogdan-Martin beat out Rashid Ismailov to ... lead the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). She prevailed 139-25 in an election where every country had one vote. (Source: politico.eu ) The ITU is a United Nations agency that started in 1865 as a way to make sure telegraph systems in different countries could use a compatible system. It now oversees many cross-border tech issues, ... (view more)

At least 175 countries have some form of online censorship according to a newly-published study. The degree varies wildly, however, and is somewhat dependent on definitions. The report comes from Comparitech, which ranked the 175 countries for ... "censorship" in six categories of Internet use: file sharing torrents, pornography, political media, social media, virtual private networks and apps for messaging or voice over Internet protocol (such as Skype). For each category it gave the country one point if it had some form of legal restriction and two points for an outright ban. That ... (view more)

Israel and Canada have the world's most affordable broadband according to a newly-published study. The rankings take into account earnings rather than just the raw broadband price. The study, published by Surfshark, also found that the parts of the ... world with the most comparatively expensive broadband also had the worst service. (Source: surfshark.com ) The overall rankings take into account the prices for the cheapest fixed-line broadband package in a country plus the cost of 1GB of mobile broadband data. The researchers then compared these sums to average earnings in the country. Note that ... (view more)

Indonesia is a complex country. Something that is perhaps accentuated by the fact that it is spread across more than 17,000 islands, 6,000 of which are inhabited. 270 million people live in the world's third-largest democracy, which is fast becoming ... an economic powerhouse and is now Southeast Asia's biggest economy. Indonesia is also home to the highest percentage of VPN users in the world - 61% as of 2020 (all usage stats taken from GlobalWebIndex reports) of the world's fifth-biggest population are estimated to use VPNs. It's a huge figure: three times as much as most North American and ... (view more)