She served as a member of the Bundestag between 1998 and 2013 when, as a "party list" candidate, she narrowly failed to secure re-election in the Brandenburg-Potsam electoral district.

[1] At the end of 2013 it was announced that she had been appointed to serve as Germany's data protection commissioner in succession to Peter Schaar, with effect from 6 January 2014.

[2][3][4][5] Andrea Astrid Voßhoff was born into a family of waterways workers in the little town of Haren in northern Germany, close to the Dutch border.

The area in which she was born was traditionally Protestant, but slightly more than a decade before her birth, through a combination of industrial scale ethnic cleansing and various local factors, the region had, like much of western Germany, become more evenly balanced in respect of the Protestant-Catholic mix.

She joined the centre-right "Christian Democratic Union" (CDU) which at that time, under the leadership of Dr. Helmut Kohl, was the larger of the two parties sharing power in Germany's governing coalition.

[17] She was also one of the twelve members of the Bundestag "Wahlausschuss" (Committee), which at that time was empowered to appoint directly half of the judges on Germany's Supreme Constitutionality Court.

As in 2009,[11] her SPD opponent for direct election was Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a locally popular centrist member of his party with a longstanding national profile as a former (and, as matters turned out, future) German Minister for Foreign Affairs.

[18][19] On 19 December 2013 a Bundestag vote confirmed Andrea Voßhoff's appointment as Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in succession to Peter Schaar whose retirement had taken effect, formally, three days earlier, following a ten-year incumbency.

[5][21] More generally ventilated was a suspicion that Voßhoff had been given the job as a consolation prize following her unexpected failure to secure re-election to the Bundestag because of an unforeseen quirk in the psephological arithmetic.

Writing a little more than nine months after her installation, Constanze Kurz, on behalf of the Chaos Computer Club, was already prepared to describe Voßhoff's first year in office as "a disaster".

[22] In 2016 Andre Meister felt able to provide a less one-sided assessment: "This critique [which the Data Protection Protectioner had just authored, and which had then been leaked] could hardly be clearer.

In a review of Voßhoff's term, Constanze Kurz renewed her criticism on netzpolitik.org, attesting to the outgoing federal data protection commissioner's lack of visibility in public debates, even though events relevant to data protection law, such as the entry into force of the DSGVO or the controversy over the state Trojan, fell during Voßhoff's term.