Liability costs
It is amusing that the British are so concerned with their privacy. Does any nation have as many surveillance cameras per capita as England ? There doesn't yet seem to be an understanding by the members of any society today that privacy is an anachronism. We are holding on to a value that was for a different time much like the morality and view of human beings that rests on Christian theology (at least in the West).
Societies today in the developed world are highly complex machines where people are simply the cogs that make it function. Everyone in the tech world knows the difficulties one has to overcome to scale for large volumes of data. The scale of our societies today seems to be moving in a direction that requires that the concept of the individual become irrelevant. We are becoming more and more like ants.
Oddly enough, in days when people lived in small villages there was no privacy. Escaping to large urban population centers provided a sense of anonymity but what really happened was that one's identity became an identity based upon the system's knowledge of you. Computational capacity has allowed for the system to expand its knowledge and control over identity. We may exist as flesh and blood but our life in the developed world is a data life. If all records of a human being's existence were eliminated, that person actually would cease to exist. They may exist as any animal does but their existence within a society would cease and their range of action would be very circumscribed.
We know what is happening which is probably why there are so many people screaming today about privacy issues. We are always looking to hold someone liable for things that don't go the way we would like them to go and though there will be the occasional scapegoat, the overall direction doesn't change. There will always be those people at the margins who will attempt to remove themselves from the system to keep their nebulous concept of privacy intact but for the rest of us, that battle is over.
There is no conspiracy in all this, no cabal at command central. It is a dynamic necessary for societies to exist at the scale we currently live. Our existence is the sum total of the trail of records we leave behind us like slime from a snail.