Does the UK take privacy more seriously than the US?

With all the recent news and leaks about the NSA mining peoples social media,phone, and internet data in secret, do you think the UK is better?  I know there is way more CCTV, but do you think the government is also mining everyones personal data without there consent?  Curious what people think, I bet it is the same. 

This is not new. The law was passed in 2006 by Bush, it's just a continuation. The difference now is that because phone companies are not keeping the data for longer than a few years and the government want it kept for longer, so basically they are going to store it. If you watched Question Time about 3 weeks ago you'd have see that the same argument is taking place here. The British government already have a law that states they can, under a warrant, access phone records just to tell them who was called, where and the duration...not the content, they are debating a new law that enables the data to be kept because the phone companies won't keep it longer than a few years.