Exactly, mostly it could be a good thing. The level of competence of government IT competence varies wildly across different countries, offices, etc. In places like Germany which shares nothing between government offices on principle, there is a lot of extra potential for your information to get compromised through security bugs, targeted intelligence activity by foreign nations, etc. just because there is all this extra data entry that happens with just about every interaction with governments. Every time you do that, it potentially ends up in the wrong place. From what I've seen, getting your hands on information is probably not rocket science. Ancient IT systems, underpaid staff doing who knows what, lots of potential for social engineering as well as there are a lot of people with access to information. Auditing is probably lacking as well. People still uses faxes here. Because it is supposedly 'secure' (#facepalm). You can't get them to email you but they'll happily put your data on a telephone wire unencrypted. All that rubber stamp work is easily forge-able as well.
So, given all that, the only thing you can safely assume that most of what EU governments store on you is known by a wide range of foreign intelligence agencies; some of them considerably more hostile than the NSA which we all love to hate. Mostly you're not providing any new information whatsoever when you fill in the forms to enter e.g. the US. It's just security theater.