I’ve heard of a black person being turned away at a bar by bouncers in Austria (which has similar culture to Bavaria), which is anecdotal. Also anecdotally, when I was there myself in the less-urban parts of Bavaria, I didn’t see any non-white people.
It didn’t remind me much of rural USA or what you described it as (my recollection of that is a bit fainter and more dated than urban USA).
Different threat models. There’s the threat of being punished or fired by workplace surveillance;
Separately, there’s also the threat of some unknown third-party snooping on your data for whatever other reason (identify fraud, etc).
The post discusses the first and I’d argue that’s more compelling for most people, but the second is also valid.