Its been getting pretty bad for a long while now. On the topic of UK privacy, there's an interesting requirement that if you are a "data controller" processing "personal" data for "non-exempt" purposes, you need to register with the ICO to go on the register. Even can apply to individuals.

Sounds great until you realize anyone that does that effectively gets their residential address publicly doxxed and archived by archive.org (unless they can use a separate company address or spend money on a po box). And to make it worse, unless you have an obvious named company it's basically useless for looking up data controllers.

The UK should just be banned from modern technology until their government has evolved socially enough to respect privacy. Companies need to pull out and stay out, because that's the only way the UK government will learn a lesson.

and civil service is blindly following orders.