Informational self-determination is an important ground for individual and societal notions of freedom. It relies on what we know about those surveilling us. However, as surveillance has become too huge a phenomenon to be “known” in any substantial sense anymore, generating informational self-determination has be delegated to data protection, a judicial canon which is designed to provide us with secure knowledge, at least in principle. But as data protection itself has grown a complicated topic, it has in fact only eroded our capacity to make any informed judgements. What we have to rely on in the end is hear-say knowledge and our trust regarding the involved agencies. And that's not good for our informational self-determination at all.