Why Is America So Far Behind Europe on Digital Privacy?

What I see is that there's plenty of innovation in Europe but it's rarer for companies to become the monstrous beasts that are so well known in America, which might make it harder to see.

Also some of the companies you've listed are genuinely innovative (Google produced the best search engine, SpaceX made reusable rockets work, Tesla made electric cars work, Apple made PDAs work) but others are large because they have limited competition due to being in an expensive industry (it's hard to build a fab and start producing CPUs like Intel or to buy as many distribution centers or datacenters as Amazon) or because they blatantly flaunt the law to the point where they likely couldn't have started in Europe, where regulators have teeth and use them (Uber, Airbnb).

Another difference might be that in America you get one enormous company that does many things while in Europe you get small companies that do one thing each. Google does email, photos, search, YouTube etc., Amazon does retail and cloud and Facebook owns most major social networks. In Europe there are smaller companies that do all of these things, they're just not unified in one enormous organization. That doesn't mean there's no innovation, it just means you have to look in more than one place to find it.

To give some examples of smaller, successful, mission-focused European companies: Spotify does nothing but music, Skype did nothing but voice and video calling (before being acquired), there are a few email providers like Protonmail and Mailbox.org, a few major cloud providers like Leaseweb, Hetzner and OVH, Criteo, a huge AdTech company, Mikrotik which produces networking equipment, uBlox which produces GPS modules. Those are just a few off the top of my head.

A key difference is in the default definition of what "privacy" is relative to. In America, there is a strong notion of privacy from the government but a much weaker notion of privacy from companies. In Europe, it is the other way around. In the specific case of digital privacy, you are adding economic considerations to the equation which just reinforces the existing status quo on both sides since the America's tech industry is vastly larger than Europe's and therefore has much greater skin in the game.

The political dynamics are different because (1) Americans don't trust governments and especially the Federal government, for complex historical reasons and (2) the majority of legal authority to regulate, tax, etc resides with the individual States, not the Federal government, so relatively few things can be implemented "nationally" in the US. If you model individual States as "countries" conceptually, the political dynamics make a lot more sense.

For the EU, if there is a belief that their tech companies can't out-compete against foreign rivals (Think search engine, social media, cyber sec, etc) and that their data could be used against them in the near future, it may seem intuitive to put privacy checkers to get foreign entities in line with your interests.