Without judging this I see one positive thing - it is publicly known what information is collected, there is a debate about it and you can file a lawsuit agains

Without judging this I see one positive thing - it is publicly known what information is collected, there is a debate about it and you can file a lawsuit against it. And as seen in Germany they courts are really taking the issue serious and don't just try to silence you. To me this seems orders of magnitude better than not even knowing what is going. Of course, as seen in the case of the UK, there is no guarantee that nothing else is going on but even after the events of last weeks I still have quite a bit of trust in Europe. After reading a bit into it I think the situation is actually quite good. The EU passed the directive requiring all EU countries to adopt national laws for data retention but now there are lawsuits all over the place. The directive has been widely adopted by the member states - in some cases after being sued by the EU for not adopting the directive (but this court is not responsible for ensuring that the directive does not violate other laws) - but at least in Germany, Romania and the Czech Republic the laws have been canceled after they were ruled unconstitutional. There are pending lawsuits against national laws in other countries, more lawsuits against member states, for example Germany, by the EU for not adopting the directive and lawsuits against the directive. After being ruled unconstitutional and violating human rights in several countries I think it is only a matter of time until the whole thing gets buried. It will have cost an insane amount of time, money and dedication but the system still seems - more or less - to work.