There’s been a lot of commentary over the USSA’s fall into blackness in the 2007 International Privacy Ranking, and rightly so. But when I look at their map, I see something far worse.

Here are the map for 2007’s rankings and its legend:

Pretty grim picture, eh? Even at this size, it’s hard to tell which countries scored best. Going back to the report, the highest scoring country is Greece. In fact, it’s the only country among those surveyed—and there are a large number of countries not included—that reached the “adequate safeguards” level. And that’s the lowest of the good levels!

I haven’t yet read the entire report, but skimming the summary of key points, two stick out ominously:

• The 2007 rankings show an increasing trend amongst governments to archive data on the geographic, communications and financial records of all their citizens and residents. This trend leads to the conclusion that all citizens, regardless of legal status, are under suspicion.
• The privacy trends have been fueled by the emergence of a profitable surveillance industry dominated by global IT companies and the creation of numerous international treaties that frequently operate outside judicial or democratic processes.

Because there are many individuals worldwide who still value privacy, I’m reluctant to conclude it is entirely dead, but looking at these data, there appears to be nowhere a privacy-minded person can go and be reasonably assured he or she won’t be surveilled, fingerprinted, or tracked in some way. Very sad.