I'm French and live in the UK, so feel qualified to compare. A few examples off the top of my head :
The UK census and most NHS health records include ethnicity and religion data. In France it's forbidden by law for any entity to collect this information.
Any idiot in the UK (including direct marketing firms) can purchase the electoral register which has a wealth of personal data. You can opt out of one version, but not from the one that political parties, election officials or private credit agencies (!) have full unfettered access to.
Credit agencies, by the way, don't exist at all in France.
I think this qualifies the UK as "not especially more privacy minded", for at least some definitions of privacy.
As it happens I am also French and living in the UK.
The ban on ethnic/racial data in France is a byproduct of the idealistic French republican view that the only thing that matters is whether people are citizens or foreigners and that citizens are all identical. This is not about "privacy".
But, pragmatically for a census, the British questions make much more sense and give a better snapshot of the country. In fact, in general the UK is more pragmatic than France and that has worked for the better historically.
In the UK the electoral register is a public record for good reasons (who can vote should be transparent), and as such it is available to anyone.
Credit agencies are a pragmatic (again) and private (emphasised) tool to protect against credit risk (I believe the GDPR express this as "legitimate interest"). The UK is much more trade and business oriented than France. Again that has worked rather well for them historically.
None of that counters my point about protection from the state.
In fact this is historically a very key difference between the UK and France: the power of the state/king was limited early in England (Magna Carta and all that) while France has had an absolutist streak (Louis XIV, French Revolution, Voltaire in exile in England, even Napoleon). To this day the role and power of the state is much stronger in France than in the UK.
I find this is a contradiction of French culture: on the one hand this disobedient and 'revolutionary' streak but, on the other hand a very strong state with people tending to call on the state for help about everything and anything. Or maybe these are the two sides of the same coin.
The UK census and most NHS health records include ethnicity and religion data. In France it's forbidden by law for any entity to collect this information.
Any idiot in the UK (including direct marketing firms) can purchase the electoral register which has a wealth of personal data. You can opt out of one version, but not from the one that political parties, election officials or private credit agencies (!) have full unfettered access to.
Credit agencies, by the way, don't exist at all in France.
I think this qualifies the UK as "not especially more privacy minded", for at least some definitions of privacy.