Planning an international vacation? Wanna avoid a brutal government regime that will suppress, censor, monitor, or infiltrate your online experience while you’re there?
If so, we’ve got the map for you.
Created by Virtual Private Network service provider IVPN, and based on year-old data compiled from Freedom House’s massive “Freedom on the Net” report, the map below lets you click on nearly any country in the world to see a breakdown of just how liberated its Internet access is.
The U.S., with its strong First Amendment protections (recent hiccups not withstanding), is still marked free, as is most of western Europe, Kenya, and Argentina. Countries like India, with its relatively low Internet access and sporadically enforced laws (like the girl who was arrested for clicking “Like” on an allegedly blasphemous post) are considered partly free. Belarus, which wants a system to track everything its citizens do online, as well as bastions of government censorship like China, Pakistan, and Iran, are all a blunt “not free.”
(Click map to view interactive version)
So maybe that reduces your vacation plans a little bit. On the other hand, don’t you want to tell your friends you’ve been to Estonia?
Photo via Justin Hall/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)
