Terms

Who runs this

FreedomLens is run by Simon Pokorny in the Czech Republic as an independent, non-commercial project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for any of the organisations whose data it shows. Write to [email protected] about anything on this page.

What the numbers are

Every raw measurement here was made by somebody else and is credited to them. This site did not measure anything. What belongs to FreedomLens is the framing, and it is a real editorial contribution rather than a formatting choice:

• The composite indices. The FreedomLens indices are assembled here. No institution stands behind those recipes, and they are labelled as ours everywhere they appear. Where a genuinely published index is shown — V-Dem’s, UNDP’s, Freedom House’s, the Worldwide Governance Indicators — the row names its publisher.
• The direction on each indicator. Whether a higher value is treated as freer, less free, or neither is a judgement made here.
• The rescaling. Values are normalised between the 1st and 99th percentile rather than the outright extremes, so one implausible reported figure cannot set the scale for every country.
• The coverage threshold. An index needs 60% of its weight present or it reports nothing, rather than scoring a country on the parts that happen to exist.

Any index you build yourself, with the weights or the formula editor, is yours in the same sense: it is a combination you chose, and nothing about it is endorsed by this site or by the producers of its parts. The sources page records who measured what, under which licence, and how firmly those terms are established — including the ones where the honest answer is “not very”.

What this site does not promise

The site is provided as it is, free of charge, without any warranty. In particular there is no promise that:

• the figures are accurate, current, or free of error — they are reproduced from their producers, who revise them, and a rebuild can change what you saw yesterday;
• an indicator measures what its name suggests to you. Each one’s information card says how the number is actually arrived at and what it will mislead you about, and that paragraph is the point of the feature;
• any index here — ours or the ones you build — is a sound basis for a decision about a country, a policy, an investment, a journey, or a person;
• the site will stay available, or that any address will keep working.

Nothing here is legal, financial, investment, travel or safety advice. If a number matters to you, follow it back to the producer named beside it and check it against their own publication and methodology. To the extent Czech law allows, Simon Pokorny is not liable for loss arising from reliance on anything on this site. Nothing on this page limits liability for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, for harm to life or health, or any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — and if you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by anything written here.

Using what is here

The source code is published under the MIT licence. The written material on this site — the descriptions, the notes and the blog — is by Simon Pokorny; you may quote it with credit and a link.

The statistics are not this site’s to license. Each dataset stays under the terms of the body that produced it, and those terms differ. Some permit commercial use and some do not; some are published in writing and some are inferred from silence. Downloading a table, taking a data file, or embedding a chart copies somebody else’s data, and their licence travels with it — the CSV and the data files carry the producer, the citation and the licence for that reason. Copying this site does not carry those permissions with it. Read the ledger before reusing anything.

Charts embedded elsewhere

You may embed a FreedomLens chart in another page, including a page that earns money, provided the embedded view does not draw on a source whose licence forbids it — the source line on each chart and the ledger say which those are. The embed always names the producers of what it shows and always links back to the full viewer, and neither may be removed or obscured. It sends nothing to the page holding it and no analytics run inside it.

A caption you write around an embed is yours and this site cannot vouch for it. If you pin a year in the snippet, the chart keeps showing that year; if you choose the newest year instead, what a reader sees will move when the data is rebuilt.

Corrections and complaints

If something here is wrong, write to [email protected] and say what and where. Errors in the framing — a wrong direction, a bad description, an index that double-counts — are this site’s to fix, and it will. Errors in the underlying measurements belong to the producer who made them; the most this site can do is correct what it says about them, or stop showing the series.

Currently 8 sources supply 60 indicators here, of which 2 publish no clear terms covering reuse, or publish statements that disagree. If you are one of those producers and disagree with how this site reads your licence, the address above reaches the person who decided it, and the data can be withdrawn the same day.

Which law applies

These terms are governed by Czech law. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the EU, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of your own country, and you may bring proceedings in the courts there. For everyone else, the courts of the Czech Republic have jurisdiction.

There is no contract between you and this site: nothing is sold, nothing is charged for, and no account exists to agree to anything. Using the site means accepting that it is offered as described above and not otherwise.

Changes to this page

The date at the top says when it last changed. There is no notification and no version history: this page is short enough to re-read.