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LONDON — American tech companies have long suspected that Europe is out to get them. They might be right.

In a speech on Tuesday, Günther Oettinger, the European Commission member in charge of the digital economy, lashed out at the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook, saying that these United States tech giants were grabbing large chunks of Europeans’ online data and trying to sidestep Europe’s tough privacy rules — and that Europe needed a forceful response.

“Americans are in the lead. They have the data, the business models and the power,” Mr. Oettinger, a German politician, told an audience in Brussels. “They come along with their electronic vacuum cleaner and suck up all the data, take it back to California, process it and sell it as a service for money.”

The commissioner also warned on Tuesday that international tech companies must do more to comply with the region’s strict data protection rules, which are now being revised to give Europeans greater control over their online activities. Under the current proposals, companies that misuse individuals’ data may face fines of up to $125 million or 5 percent of their global revenue, whichever is higher.

“Anyone who wants to take advantage of our data will have to comply with our rules or they are going to have trouble with the competition authorities,” said Mr. Oettinger, who added that companies like Apple and Facebook now had more information about their customers than did banks.

If companies do not comply, Mr. Oettinger added, they “ultimately, perhaps, may be thrown out of the single market.”

His comments come as several American tech companies face legal challenges over how they operate in the 28 European Union countries.

Google is fighting a four-year antitrust investigation into its dominant position in Europe’s online search market. The European tax arrangements of both Apple and Amazon are being investigated after questions were raised about whether they had received preferential tax treatment from certain European countries.

And the social network Facebook, whose roughly one billion non-American users are regulated from Dublin, where the company has its European headquarters, is facing questions from Dutch, Belgian and German data protection regulators about whether its revamped privacy policy complies with European law.

As Europe’s economy continues to sputter, the region’s policy makers want to tap into the growing number of technology hubs in Europe to create jobs, build new industries and compete with the likes of Silicon Valley.

As part of these efforts, the European Commission is working on a number of digital rules aimed at making it easier for European companies to stand toe-to-toe with their international rivals. Its efforts include plans to overhaul the region’s data protection laws, copyright legislation and sales tax regime so that digital companies from Portugal to Poland can become pan-European businesses that can compete with the likes of Alibaba of China.

Until now, however, many European tech companies have found it difficult to raise sufficient venture capital to take on the latest start-ups from the West Coast, while Europe’s diverse national laws have made it hard for companies to expand quickly across the 28-member bloc.

“We desperately need a digital single market,” Michel Combes, chief executive of the telecommunications provider Alcatel Lucent, said in an interview. “Competition isn’t on a European level. It’s on a global level.”