If you rent a locker, and the terms of the rental agreement say that the person you're renting from has access to the locker for any reason, then the cops do not need a warrant to ask the lessor to open the locker, only a warrant to coerce the lessor to open the locker.
If the lessor is willing to let anybody take a picture of what is in the locker for $5, then the government doing so isn't abusing its special privilege.
In practice, most people do not understand the ramifications of the things they agreed to that put this data out there (if they even read it!) and in many cases did not have reasonable alternatives to the services that they signed up for.
The typical powerful west European countries are corrupt to the core and when people feel we are better off than in the US (self congratulatory posts are common) it's generally lack of political awareness and involvement more than anything.
That's spot on, and your analogy is a good one, except that in the realm of personal information, no warrant is required in the US.
There is quite a bit of law and numerous court decisions around this process in the US.
That jurisprudence is more generally called the Third-Party Doctrine[0]:
The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that
people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone
companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no
reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. A lack of privacy
protection allows the United States government to obtain information from
third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with
the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable
cause and a judicial search warrant.[1]
Edit: To clarify, I disagree with this doctrine and would love to see limitations on data retention periods as well as warrant requirements for access to such data.
True, but it's even worse than that. Many of those who do understand it, simply don't care ("nothing to hide", "nothing to fear", etc.).
The allure of a "free" service that everyone else uses is enough to abandon any expectation of privacy, and consciously come up with arguments that it doesn't matter.
Going further, it must be clarified that the whole point of doing things this way is that people do not understand it. The people who want to surveil everyone could either do it illegally and get in trouble, or create an inscrutable bureaucratic system that so sufficiently obscures what they are doing that they get the same results along with a legal cover if they are discovered. If we did have privacy laws that prevented this, they would just collect it illegally. This is absolutely not to say that privacy laws are pointless (they would be helpful) but that we must understand this situation not as an accident, but as the slow creation of a class of people who want to exercise power over us and have been getting their way.
Gmail launched in 2004.
The Patriot act was signed in to law in October 2001.
Bill Binney blew the whistle on illegal NSA mass data collection of email, web browsing, and cell phone records in 2002.
Hard to pinpoint when smartphones became mainstream, though as a point of reference the iPhone was launched in 2007.
So clearly the NSA was trying to do dragnet surveillance of the internet well before gmail or the widespread use of smartphones.
A quote from the Bill Binney wikipedia page: "Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that 'it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...
In this site there's a trend to treat Europe as a monolithic entity and pretend it's awesome. Any criticism gets taken as "Americuns" being ignorant and europe is awesome.
In reality, I see a lot of unwillingness to accept the political reality and pretend "we are better than USA" via political apathy and coping.
People react negatively when you point out polítical facts they don't want to see. It's easier to look at USA with an air of superiority. This also happens the other way around, of course, but HN demographics make one more typical.