“Facebook just took its U.S. privacy policy and rolled it out in Europe,” said Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer who has filed a class-action lawsuit against the social network involving more than 25,000 users for violating the region’s data protection laws when it sent individuals’ personal data to the United States, where domestic intelligence agencies could gain access to the information. “They never wanted to adapt their privacy rules to anywhere outside America.”

Microsoft claims that its cloud computing services (which allow people to store documents and photos on the Internet) now comply with Europe’s tough data protection rules — the only American company so far to receive such approval.

Google, meanwhile, is scrambling to comply with a recent European court ruling that allows anyone — whether in or out of the 28-member European Union — to ask that links to online information about themselves be removed from its global search results.

Although Google fought hard to block this so-called right to be forgotten, it lost the battle, and has scrubbed thousands of links from its search results to adhere to the European ruling. Advocates for the new standard are hoping to force the company to extend the practice across its entire global search business — and potentially to the United States.

“Americans really do care about these issues,” said Gus Hosein, a senior fellow at Privacy International, a London-based consumer advocacy group that campaigns for tougher privacy laws. “But right now, they have very limited rights that they can exert over how their data is used.”

For their part, Google and Facebook maintain that they follow the privacy standards wherever their users are, and that people can opt out of online advertising or delete online profiles if they want to stop using the companies’ services.

Across the globe, countries are looking toward Europe for cues on how best to protect their citizens’ privacy.