Paper Short Abstract:

This paper draws on concepts of thirdness as a point of exit from the moral ambiguity that surrounds information collection. In the context of German privacy advocacy, bureaucratic institutions configured by the German constitutional state offer moral mediators for personal information.

Paper Abstract:

Surveillance scholars have long observed that surveillance may take both legitimate and illegitimate forms. This paper draws on concepts of thirdness to offer a point of exit from this ambiguity. The variable moral legitimacy of the third may offer insight into the variable legitimacy of the surveillance in question.

Drawing on ongoing ethnography with privacy and data protection advocates in Germany, the paper explores emic notions of bureaucracy as a legitimate mediator of personal information. Placing archival research in local district courts into juxtaposition with discourses of opposition to surveillance, the paper suggests that the relative legitimacy of information collection in this context rests upon how information collection is institutionally mediated. Associational life (Vereine), configured and enabled by the German constitution provides, here, the societal basis for the 'activities' (Solove 2008), that a discourse of privacy is called on to protect.