That whole using-personal-information-to-burn-people thing is still (barely) in living memory in Europe. There have been riots in Germany over the government trying to take a census - with good reason.
Privacy is more important than a lot of shallow people imagine.
Well, the U.S. has its own history of people who shoot at census takers, and so on. From a legal perspective, the EU and member state implementing laws are: (1) more protective of the individual over the corporation than US laws, and (2) fairly onerous and expensive for companies to comply with. In fact, compliance is a kind of red herring, since many of the data protection rules in place are ambiguous or nonsensical. Personal privacy is basically a global policy experiment at the moment.
True, though I have to admit that Neelie Kroes seems to have plenty of both executive authority and the willingness to exercise it in a muscular fashion. It helps that the EU privacy protections are closer to the constitutional than the legislative level.
Privacy is more important than a lot of shallow people imagine.