Our Digital Quality of Life

Since we spent so much time being online, the quality of digital life we have impacts our physical being and overall quality of life as well.

Recently the first ever Digital Quality Of Life (DQL) research has been conducted by security experts “Surfshark” to evaluate the digital quality of life of 65 countries. Since we spent so much time online, and as of 2019, the number of people using the internet has grown to 4.3 billion users who on average spent 6 hours browsing the web every day, the quality of digital life we get becomes an important factor for measuring our overall quality of life.

The research was made discussing and evaluating countries based on 6 factors: affordability of connectivity, the speed of connectivity, security of citizens’ personal information, advancement of cybersecurity, e-services offered by government, content that can be accessed in a specific country. The study has been conducted in order to identify key issues in countries which affects our quality of digital life.

6 Factors of Digital Quality of Life

1. The Internet Speed — there is no doubt that the speed of the internet has a big influence on our quality of digital life. The internet itself impacts social and economic growth, allowing people to connect to each other all across the world, to work, to learn and to get information. It also has become a crucial part of getting goods and services, since e-commerce is growing every year. The faster the internet the more one can do online through the same period of time, the more does our quality of digital lives increases. The expert panel at DQL research has selected this factor as a crucial one to determining the quality of citizens life.
2. The Price of The Internet — a country can have a fast internet, but if it is not affordable for most of the citizens it will cause decrease in countries digital quality of life. That is why the price of the internet was also selected to be one of the measures of countries DQL. This measure is especially important to less economically developed countries.
3. The Personal Data Protection Laws — the expert panel at DQL also ranked personal data protection laws as one of the most important factors of ones digital quality of life. If citizen’s data is not protected and the citizen can be manipulated because of it, the quality of life decreases. We can think of it this way: we can’t live without laws guaranteeing protection of our lives, the same we cannot live without protection of our digital lives.
4. The E-Government Availability — as stated by the DQL research “Electronic government can provide better service delivery at reduced costs and has the potential to increase overall efficiency.”. E-government helps citizens to simplify and optimise processes such as voting, it also minimises corruption and ensures transparency.
5. The Entertainment Content Availability — to see how much entertainment content is accessible in the country such platforms as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube Premium and adult content were chosen, since they are the most popular right now. Availability of these kind of entertainment platforms and services despite users’ geographical location were measured.
6. The Global Cybersecurity Index — “A country’s commitment to and the capabilities of its national cybersecurity are critical to the overall well-being of its citizens and economic growth”. The quality of our digital lives obviously depends on our security online, this time not just data but overall protection from cyberattacks, protection of such information as national security, health and financial records.

Key and the most interesting findings

• The mediate value of 2019 DQL research was only 0.6110 out of 1.000. This shows that overall all countries needs improvement of their digital quality of life.
• Five of the 10 highest-ranking countries are in Europe, three in Asia and one in North America (Canada). United States didn’t fall in 10 best list. Highest — Australia. You can see all the ratings here.
• 10 countries that have lowest DQL are from Asia (5 countries), Africa (4 countries) and South America (Ecuador). Lowest — Algeria.

• Research didn’t take into consideration but discussed the price discrimination between countries. It provides proof that you can get for example cheaper plane tickets based on your location.
• Censorship that is carried out for political, moral and religious reasons weren’t taken into DQL index because it is hard to measure and compare it, but it was discussed in the research. It is mentioned that the censorship is increasing every year, and it affects the digital quality of life since the information that citizens get is different and can influence their behaviours and minds.
• In Higher-income countries mobile speed is usually lower than broadband speed.
• 62 out of 65 countries analysed has some sort of personal data protection laws, but the experts at the panel warns us that some data protection laws are made to justify citizens surveillance rather than protecting their data.
• Although Australia scored the highest ratings in DQL they have problems in cybersecurity field, they are in need of cybersecurity professionals to ensure the safety of the government and people.
• It was hard to analyse China, since people in China have local alternatives to the services that are used worldwide and censorship in China is huge.
• Digital Quality of Life correlates with the country’s GDP per capita. The higher the GDP the higher the DQL index.

Digital Quality of Life research is the first one this kind, that analyses the quality of our lives online. It lays the foundation for further research of out digital well-being, which is important to analyse, since it is becoming more important as the world becomes more digitised.

You can find all the research here: https://surfshark.com/dql-report.pdf