Claiming the UK has better individual privacy than the US is blatantly false. There are a lot of things I like about the UK, but privacy is
not one of them. Some examples:
The UK has no equivalent to the Fifth Amendment. In the UK, it is a crime not to give up your encryption keys to the police when requested. The punishment for keeping secret keys secret is two years in prison if you are suspected of most crimes, and five years in prison if you are suspected of "heinous" crimes.
The UK also does not have something like the 4th amendment, which means that things like the Terrorism Act 2000 pass without challenge. Admittedly, the USA has been just as bad in this regard (with such things as the PATRIOT act), but I suppose some of the blame has to go towards the public attitude immediately following 9/11.
In the landmark United States case Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, the SCOTUS ruled 7-2 that there was an implicit right to privacy in the United States constitution, backed by Constitutional Amendments 1,3,4,5,9, and 14. This right to privacy has not yet been used to protect internet privacy, but considering that the internet as we know it has been around for only 20 or so years, this is not exactly surprising. SCOTUS judges have a history of voting for a right to privacy despite their own personal beliefs, as demonstrated in Griswold v. CT, Bowers v. Hardwick, Roe v. Wade, etc. so this should hold up when it comes to internet privacy as well.
And then, of course, there's the UK's history of egregious privacy rights violations, including widespread state-sponsored video surveillance, suspicion-less stop-and-searches, extensive usage of web-filtering system, and even deep packet inspection of and tampering with content transferred over HTTP.
So the funny thing is that the UK already has extensive monitoring of people in cities, huge cloud computers monitoring their traffic, and extensive wiretapping. What you're describing as a terrible future for the US is already a reality in the UK.