Germany is an outlier; their history with the Nazis makes the country unusually conservative about anything that could be abused for mass-surveillance purposes.

Germany is an outlier; their history with the Nazis makes the country unusually conservative about anything that could be abused for mass-surveillance purposes. Not that this is a bad thing---being able to think differently like this is one of the positives of having countries!---but relative to the rest of the world, what Germany considers "surveillance" is unusual and sometimes surprising.