Agreed, but that's not quite my point. In Europe, you're asked for a lot more personal information than you and I may be used to, and it's actually verified a lot more than you may expect. You don't generally need to hand over your SSN to book an Amtrak ticket. In Europe, you not only often do, but you may well find yourself expected to present documents to verify it once you get to the train station (e.g. Spain).

Virtually every business, including purely online services, will want your full address (and will often verify that the address is a real residential address by sending it to some dodgy identity-verifying third party). Very few websites will be content with a username and password. This can rise into the absurd, such as not being able to book a table at a restaurant without verifying your personal information with a dodgy B2B provider of identity services. You may have bad anecdotes of your own, but this is really a much more systematic issue in Europe than elsewhere. Europe has lots of privacy laws not because they're taking some benevolent stance against US tech, but because Europe has a genuine problem protecting their citizens' privacy on a day to day basis.