[mindslight]

There is much less "government compulsion" in the US, but in its place is still de facto compulsion. In general, comparisons with the US are difficult because in the US large corporations are given the power of defining much of societal policy.

Saying that "Facebook/Google etc aren't supposed to share the data with the government" only makes sense in some abstract sense of it wasn't supposed to be like this. But power tends to coalesce - the only "supposed to" is in some abstract moral stewardship sense, a responsibility that has been long forgotten by the business community, if it ever existed in the first place. Facebook/Google want to agglomerate data from the financial surveillance bureaus, and the (nominal) government buys the proceeds from both of them in a "free market" transaction. And then on the output/control side, companies use these surveillance databases to weed out "undesirable" customers, with their competitors following in lock step lest they end up with even more undesirables.