>Why are all European countries interested in surveillance all of a sudden in the last 3-4 years?
Because they look at what happened US, at the rise of popularity of fascism throughout the world (which is mostly perpetuated by key media players under the mask of being "anti-woke"), and basically decide that the people can no longer be trusted.
And they are fully correct.
Ive said this before on here, but the whole idea of privacy from surveillance is not applicable anymore in todays world.
The standard line of arguing is that people should be able to speak the truth free from government knowing about it and trying to silence them. The problem with this
* Most of the "truth" that these people refer to has been literally false propaganda, or ability to say slurs on social media.
* Despite that fact, not a single public media person speaking these lies has been silenced in any way by the government, despite things like patriot act existing in US or equivalent things in EU. The only time people have been silenced in places like UK is when posting extremely out of pocket stuff.
Furthermore people also say that you don't want to give the government the power to do this now because a government that you may not like will want to do this. Well, to no one surprise, the people with this libertarian mindset (and the so called "centrists") overwhelmingly vote right wing, and consequently, right wing runs on a platform of freedom, but when those people get in power, they not only actively tries to silence actual truth and free speech, but also they just don't give a fuck about the law and do what they want anyways.
So as unfortunate as it is, its a much better outcome for the current state of administration in EU to take a more invasive role in policing the populace, because economic growth and stability over long term is worth way more than some idealistic approach based on above. Historically this has shown to be true over and over again, while the latter has shown to result in economic decline. So its wortwhile to sacrifice some personal rights in return for a better future - we already do this to a large extent so this is nothing new.
In terms of applicability to the regular person, please understand that the privacy ship for you has already long sailed. You already can be tracked and analyzed in extreme detail, by really any person or company that is willing to buy advertising data and do correlation. There are companies that literally do this and contract out to the government. Also, you aren't that important enough to care about.