Colin Bennett, in his recent text The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance, does a nice job creating a developing a typography for privacy advocates. Of a minor controversy, his text doesn’t include data protection commissioners as ‘privacy advocates’, even if they self-identify as such, on the basis that he wants to reflect on the roles that actors from civil society now play. Privacy, when understood in terms of regulatory capacity and relevant actors, cannot be sensibly talked about just in terms of ‘official’ advocates (e.g. data commissioners) because civil society is often deeply involved in the actions, reactions, and positions that the commissioners are forced to assume. In essence, privacy advocates are sometimes friends of, foes of, or ambivalent towards the privacy commissioners (I’d use another typography for this relationship, but I’ll wait for it to be publicly presented before talking about it here. It’s really snazzy though.).

Privacy advocates, in Bennett’s terms, are classified as such:

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