Center for Global Communications

GLOCOM participated in a study conducted on behalf of the European Commission providing an international comparison of arrangements seeking to support privacy and trust in electronic communications. The study looked at the situation in the United States, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and India, with privacy arrangements in the European Union providing a basis for comparison.

The Study is available from European Commission

The project was lead by wik-Consult GmbH , Germany, and RAND Europe , United Kingdom, with partners CLIP (Fordham University, United States); CRID (Université de Namur, Belgium); and GLOCOM.

The objectives of the study were to compare what systems are present in each country to protect privacy and enhance trust in the realm of electronic communications. Additionally, the study reports on the effectiveness of these arrangements and the perceptions of various stakeholders of these different systems. This report thus does not claim to assert the superiority of any one approach, rather it seeks to identify the lessons that European policymakers might draw from the particular mechanisms in place in each country.

Understanding arrangements that seek to protect the privacy of individuals is exceedingly complex. Privacy protection often develops in a piecemeal fashion, not necessarily as part of a considered plan to provide for privacy and enhance trust. Arrangements within a given country have to be understood in a holistic fashion. Legal arrangements often interact with self-regulatory and co-regulatory schemes in complex ways. Individual rights might be enforced by a government Data Protection Authority or equivalent, by the individual (e.g. through private suit), or by industry self-regulatory and co-regulatory arrangements. There is no single benchmark approach to the measurement of effectiveness in this realm: the effectiveness of privacy and trust arrangements can only be viewed in the context of what works best for each country, based on specific economic, social and cultural conditions. The effectiveness of these arrangements, when compared between countries or even within a single country, can be highly diverse.