> Is my friend wrong? Is this more complicated? Or am I right that the discussion of what happens in Europe is framed in a way that keeps me uninformed about wh

> Is my friend wrong? Is this more complicated? Or am I right that the discussion of what happens in Europe is framed in a way that keeps me uninformed about what is really possible? European (Polish) here. Saying that all of Europe is privacy conscious is like saying that the entire US is extremely republican and never gets below 40 degrees Fahrenheit; there are a few states that fit this definition, but that's not the entire country. You have countries like Germany on one hand, where taking photos in public places is heavily restricted, you can get a ticket if the police find a dash cam in your car, quite a few organizations are passionate about avoiding Microsoft and hosting their own solutions, and a significant percentage of the population has Signal installed on their devices. On the other, you have countries like Poland, where everybody uses Facebook Messenger, nobody uses Signal, door and dash cams are perfectly legal, privacy isn't really that much of a concern, and photo laws are quite a bit less restrictive. We're both in the EU, we're neighbors actually, we both have to follow the GDPR, but the mentality and approach is very different. Over here, GDPR is mostly seen as "another stupid law that Brussels came up with and that makes things more difficult than they ought to be", not so much in Germany. A completely separate concern, unrelated to privacy, is how photo copyright is handled. In the US and some European countries (like Poland), taking photos of public buildings is legal, and you generally own the rights to those photos. In other countries, the owner / architect of a building, who owns the copyright on the design of that building, may disallow taking pictures of that design. In some places, the restrictions on photos stem from that different stance on copyright, not from any privacy concerns.