As It Denounces U.S. Spying, Europe Delays Privacy Protection at Home Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, a trained scientist, is conflicted by the pitfalls and possibilities of digital technology. BRUSSELS - Even with Europe in an uproar over intrusive United States surveillance, its leaders are looking for ways to slow down legislation aimed at preventing violations of privacy at home. Two days after Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany telephoned President Obama to complain about the monitoring of her cellphone by the United States, she joined fellow European leaders at a summit meeting in Brussels last week in agreeing not to rush into a new data privacy law, perhaps putting it off until 2015, after elections next May for a new European Parliament. Kicking decisions into the future is a permanent feature of Europe's cumbersome decision-making process. But Germany's acquiescence in a British-led effort to freeze the privacy measures highlighted what appear to be contradictions between the verbal support for privacy among European leaders and their own policy decisions. "Everyone is very eager to protect privacy in their public statements," said Miriam Artino, a policy analyst at La Quadrature du Net, a French organization that promotes digital rights and liberties. But we can see that government leaders are not very enthusiastic and are looking for ways to delay the process. The disclosures of the National Security Agency's activities by a former contractor for the it, Edward J. Snowden, have set off a fierce debate on both sides of the Atlantic about the proper balance between privacy and economic, security and other interests. In an effort to control the damage, the Obama administration indicated on Monday that it was preparing to ban surveillance of friendly foreign leaders. Ms. Merkel stayed silent about the shift, but officials in Berlin welcomed what apparently was a realization that American economic interests, too, could be harmed if the monitoring persisted. "The Americans know by now that this affair is very damaging to their own interests, which is evident in the reaction of the president, as well as the Senate," the interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, told Germany's N-TV news channel. But increasingly, it has damaged the standing of European politicians as well, as they seek to play down the role their own security services have played in secret surveillance. Britain's intelligence service is long known to have cooperated closely with the N.S.A., carrying out surveillance on behalf of the United States. The director of the N.S.A., Gen. Keith B. Alexander, testified on Tuesday before Congress that reports that his agency had collected the phone records of millions of Europeans were "completely false." Apparently referring to recent reports of extensive phone surveillance in France and Spain by the N.S.A., he said European intelligence services had themselves collected phone records in war zones and other areas outside their borders and shared them with the United States. Europe's involvement in the spying game was given further credence by a former foreign minister of Greece, Theodoros Pangalos, who told a Greek radio station that his country's intelligence services had listened in on the phone conversations of American ambassadors to Greece and Turkey in the 1990s, The Associated Press reported. In addition to what seemed to be the leaders" reluctance to rein in too sharply activities countenanced by their own spy agencies, Europe's slow-track approach to tightening the rules on privacy protection has faced a host of other hurdles. The proposed legislation in the European Parliament met with fierce opposition from business groups in the United States and Europe. There were also concerns that the issue would complicate negotiations on a wide-ranging trade agreement between Europe and the United States, a pact that many European leaders champion as an important lever to help lift Europe's sluggish economic growth. Many members of the current Parliament and officials at the European Commission, the European Union's executive arm, had wanted to push the law through before next summer. Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Parliament member who is in the vanguard of that push, said the summit meeting decision showed that Germany, the bloc's weightiest economic and political power, had been eclipsed by other nations in protecting privacy. Alison Smale and Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin.