Swedish Opinions about Privacy
Jan 12th 2007CarlPolitical & Privacy & Sweden
Today as I read the news on the Internet I came across an article about an interesting Swedish opinion poll (link: SVT in Swedish). According to this poll 91% are for camera surveillance in public places, 87% are for secret wiretapping of phone calls by the police and 51% wants that a dna-register is created about the whole population.
Hang on a second. 91% is for camera surveillance in public places? Every other person is for a dna register covering the whole population? Yes, that’s the numbers. I knew that many have become positive to increased control and less privacy the last years. But still I had to double check the numbers before I believed I read correctly.
The strength of the support surprised me. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.
But opinion polls should always be taken with precaution. It all depends about how you ask it. By changing a little bit how the question is asked you may get a different result. For example if instead of asking “Do you support secret wiretapping of phone calls?” you ask ” Do you support secret wiretapping of phone calls without a court order?” you will get a different result.
Unfortunately the media didn’t report the exact questions asked. It would have been interesting to know them.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised. After all Sweden is a country where a lot of information is public and privacy is already limited more than in many other countries. For example the tax information is public. It means that anyone can get the information about how much you earned in the past years. And that’s just an example.
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Vidde on 10 Feb 2007 at 0:11 #
You should be surprised. But I am not. This was a survey ordered by those really keen to implement a lot of surveillance in Sweden. And every result is achievable if you just ask the questions the right way and then interpret the answers the right way.
A question in this survey could be “Do you think surveying with camera at a place like this would be ok? Mark on a scale from one to ten, ten being the most ok.” If you marked higher than one, you where interpreted as being positive to surveillance.
Now, with that metod, the result is not surpricing…
Carl (admin) on 10 Feb 2007 at 13:57 #
Vidde: It’s really a pity that we don’t have the information about how exactly the questions were asked.
Vidde on 10 Feb 2007 at 22:18 #
Yes, and it is bothering me that “scientific results” keeps getting printed in newspapers as facts, but the method of the research is never even mentioned.