The first-ever Digital Quality of Life (DQL) research indexed 65 countries, covering a population of over 5.5 billion people
Privacy company Surfshark introduced the Digital Quality of Life (DQL) study that highlights gaps between people’s online experiences in various societies. The final DQL index compares countries by various digital factors such as the internet speed, country’s cybersecurity, the availability of e-government services and more. Country with the highest DQL index score in 2019 is Australia, followed by France and Singapore.
"Today, our lives are profoundly affected by our digital well-being as over half of the entire population is using the internet. We wanted to understand what matters most for people in the digital sphere and compare digital experiences around the world," says Goddy Ray, DQL research lead at Surfshark. "This is the first attempt to estimate the quality of our digital lives, which, we expect, will provide grounds for further discussions within the indexed countries."
One of the key global findings of the DQL study is that well-developed internet infrastructure does not necessarily guarantee high quality of digital life countries citizens as a composition of less tangible factors such as country’s cybersecurity or presence of personal data protection laws is essential to determine digital well-being.
The research concluded that none of the indexed countries crossed the threshold of 0.8000 (of 1.000), highlighting that there is room for improvement in various digital areas globally. The median value of DQL index is 0.6110.
The research team analyzed open-source data collected from the databases of the United Nations, the World Bank, Freedom House, the International Communications Union and other sources. The countries were ranked combining factors such as internet connectivity speed, affordability, cybersecurity, the availability of data protection laws, e-government services, and entertainment content availability.
The final 2019 Digital Quality of Life report, as well as an interactive country comparison tool, can be found here: https://surfshark.com/dql