PARIS — Olaf Storbeck, a German columnist, has decided to “ditch Googlemail b/c Prism,” he wrote on Twitter. A London-based writer for Reuters, he is now a customer of Swissmail, a Swiss provider that charges a fee, and he says he is tinkering with a VPN, a virtual private network of the kind used by many corporations.

It is too early to say what impact the disclosure of widespread Internet spying in the United States government’s Prism program will have on the European public. Not everyone here is as attuned to privacy issues as Mr. Storbeck. But official European reaction, at least, has been loud and angry.

The response in Europe is partly based on a political reaction to what is perceived as American superpower arrogance and the secrecy surrounding Prism and its supposed safeguards. But it is also founded on a different conception of privacy than in the United States, where the prevailing attitude since Sept. 11, 2001, has been that the government is doing what is required to protect citizens from attacks that can come from anywhere, including Europe.

The European response is not uniform, but it is based on tradition, differing philosophies of the law and history, especially in countries that lived under dictatorships, whether fascist or Communist, and where governments remain mistrusted.