To provide a European/Dutch perspective: I’m pretty sure that as a small employer myself, I am very much disallowed from using those mechanisms to actually inspect what employees are doing. Automated threat/virus scanning may be a legal gray zone, but monitoring-by-default is very much illegal, and there have been plenty of court cases about this. It is treated similarly to logging and reading all email, Slack messages, constantly screenrecording, or putting security cameras aimed at employees all day long. There may be exceptions for if specific fraud or abuse is suspected, but burden of proof is on the employer and just monitoring everyone is not justifiable even when working with sensitive data or goods.

So to echo a sister comment: while sadly it is common in some jurisdictions, it is definitely not normal.

I know it's common, but I don't think it's "normal" even if it has been "normalized". I wouldn't subject myself to that. If my employer doesn't trust me to act like an adult I don't think it's the place for me.

I could maybe understand it for non-tech people (virus scanning yadda yadda) but for a tech person it's a nuisance at best.