Not exactly. Most US companies have a presence in Europe and so give at least an attempt to obey European laws. While the laws are different and not as strong, the US has privacy laws in place that will protect you. China might have some of those same laws - but they don't apply to the government at all (the US makes some attempt to have laws apply to the government)

That doesn't mean you should be happy with data in America, but China is worse.

Last I knew Opera still had a decent amount of engineering staff in Poland, and still had some in Sweden, both in the EU, plus still has some amount of staff in Norway, not in the EU but definitely in Europe.

That’s not to say their privacy story is fantastic, but they very much still have European operations.

> [T]he US has privacy laws in place that will protect you [...] (the US makes some attempt to have laws apply to the government)

I believe the US stance is that nobody outside the US is entitled to court relief against the US government regarding their privacy, and nobody outside the US and EU is entitled to any relief at all, even from the executive (the “Data Protection Review Court” non-court, formerly the “Privacy Shield Ombudsperson”). In the EU, there are some protections in some countries but for example the GDPR specifically does not apply to governments.

I mean, the Chinese government is worse on this, but the US is nevertheless really bad and a number of EU countries also suck to a remarkable extent. Until the US press starts dropping the “of Americans” from their latest surprised-Pikachu headlines on “mass government surveillance of Americans”, I’m unconvinced the situation will improve.