Someone pointed out something to me and it's really struck a chord with me.

In the USA, we hate the government collecting information on us, but shrug our shoulders when corporations do it.

In Europe, it's the exact opposite. They created GDPR to restrict how corporations collect and share data about you, but they shrug their shoulders at government doing it.

Obviously, this is incredibly reductive and over-simplified, but the general idea of it feels pretty true.

Sorry, this is just not true. Stasi was a government agency, and it was from this kind of thing that European privacy advocacy sprung up.