The Jury

Elisabeth Niekrenz works as a lawyer at the law firm Spirit Legal in Leipzig. She specialises in data protection law and fights in court, among other things, for compensation for people affected by privacy violations and against online tracking. She advises businesses and public bodies on how to shape their processes and products in data protection–compliant ways. From 2019 to 2020 she was a policy advisor at the German NGO Digitale Gesellschaft, where she continues to be a member. Elisabeth is a co-editor of the 2018 anthology Chaos – on the Constitution, Subversion and Transformation of Order (original title: Chaos – Zur Konstitution, Subversion und Transformation von Ordnung).

Thilo Weichert is a former data protection commissioner of the state of Schleswig-Holstein. Netzwerk Datenschutzexpertise (Network Data Protection Expertise) is an group of experts who analyse laws and technologies in depth. Deutsche Vereinigung für Datenschutz (DVD, German Association for Data Protection) is an independent civil rights association. Thilo Weichert is a board member of Digitalcourage since 2024.

Frank Rosengart is a veteran of the BigBrotherAwards. He has been a member of the jury since 2002 and awarded the popular negative data protection prize in the “Technology” category. Frank Rosengart develops software in the Communications field and is a member of the Chaos Computer Club e.V. (CCC) – founded in 1981 and the largest European hacker association.

Rena Tangens is an artist, Internet pioneer and policy director of Digitalcourage. She co-founded Digitalcourage, then called FoeBuD, in 1987. She has received multiple awards for her work.

Ralf Bendrath is an advisor on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs to the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament, where his main work is on digital politics and data protection. In the 1990s he studied political science with a focus on security and cyberwar, in the 2000s he was a researcher at various universities on data protection regulation. From 2009 to 2018 he was an advisor to MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht, who was the rapporteur (lead negotiator) for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) at the time.

The Teckids community is a group of children, teenagers and adults who jointly pursue a shared goal: to create an understandable (digital) world. They are interested in how technology works, enjoy looking beyond the surface and work in creative ways with hardware and software.